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fluidsf · 4 years ago

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A Polar Visions / Polar Visions Amplitude review of -

Francisco López - a bunch of stuff (1980-2020)

Release date - July 2020

Reviewed format - Francisco López self-released (under the Nowhere Worldwide banner) USB business card, as kindly sent to me as a review copy by Francisco López

Note - you can purchase this release in digital format directly from Francisco López' Bandcamp page here: https://franciscolopez.bandcamp.com/album/a-bunch-of-stuff-1980-2020-40-years-of-sonogenic-composition

Welcome to the first review on Fluid Sonic Fluctuations review in 2021! Today I’m discussing Francisco López’s very large multi-part anniversary compilation a bunch of stuff (1980-2020) which was self-released by Francisco both as a neat USB business card and later reissued as download through Bandcamp in 2020. With this compilation Francisco is celebrating the 40 years he’s been creating immersive sonic compositions in the experimental and underground music scene, practicing his own coined way of sonogenic composition. a bunch of stuff (1980-2020) presents an excellent thematic overview of Francisco López’ discography through a large number of excerpts from his ever-growing universe of untitled compositions as well as titled pieces. The excerpts are organised into 15 parts which Francisco has tagged with his own invented genre names, which both point at his own personal sound philosophy but also have a subtle comic touch to them. Besides the excerpts, Francisco has also included several full-length (as well as almost full-length) as well as rare, unreleased and at the time of the original release still unreleased compositions making the compilations a great mixture of both showcase and rarities compilation. Whilst Francisco’s full-length compositions are often quite expansive in length making them suitable for a full-on immersion in the sonic universe created, the way every chronologically ordered part of a bunch of stuff (1980-2020) flows makes for a different yet equally intriguing and immersive listening experience with creative usage of both fades and hard cuts connecting the tracks together making every part that the full 12 hours worth of listening this compilation consists of a very rewarding listening experience. Francisco’s philosophy on both listening itself as well as his way of composing always originates first and foremost from the experience of listening in a very immersive sense which goes beyond source recognition or surface-level emotions but is very much settled in immersion within the sound world itself leaving the often cathartic, subconscious effects to the listeners themselves to feel and thereby completing the composition. Francisco himself reminds us of his philosophy but also shares some new insights on 40 years of sonogenic compositions in this mini-interview I did with him over email:

Orlando Laman - Over the last 40 years you've released a large number of your compositions, the selection on a bunch of stuff (1980-2020) is organized using your own invented genres. Regarding bringing together selections of compositions as collections through series (like recently, Two Head Snake) or by listeners themselves discovering certain connections between releases, how do you view your full collection of works as a whole, especially in the way all this shaped sonic matter is forming a sonic universe completed by the listener?

Francisco López - Well, as a whole I guess I see it as my way of having a more meaningful and richer interaction with the world. Not through representation (as in canonical so-called 'field recordings') but rather through penetration into sonic matter and its ontology.

OL - From listening to your compositions and interviews with you it's clear that most of the time you create compositions without planning things ahead, creating a system or trying to execute creative ideas through manipulated sound matter. It's a matter of composition that is both improvisatory based on the sounds themselves yet also very refined and perfectionist, which makes the compositions feel very natural but also unpredictable in captivating ways.

FL - This is what I call 'sonogenic composition', i.e., a practice of creative work with sound (and listening) in which sound themselves lead the way; not merely as 'samples' of elements to be placed in a pre-existing structure / grid / idea, but a generators of structure, pace, dynamics, texture and anything else imaginable in a sonic work. That's why I dislike the term 'manipulation'; in this context, I'd rather use 'evolution', which describes more reliably what takes place in this process.

OL -The results are more important than the tools used, however one thing that intrigued me is your manipulation and usage of low to sub-bass frequency layers of sound within many of your compositions, even those from the early 1980s, with low to sub-bass frequency sounds being an area of sonic matter that falls somewhere between the audible and felt area of sound and its direction being hard for humans to discern, how do you view this field of sonic matter relating to your compositions? Is it an area of the spectrum which you intuitively often accentuate in compositions or is this area one which you've gotten used to working with overtime to fully utilize the audible (and inaudible) spectrum of sound we can hear from sub-bass to very high frequencies?

FL - I like rich music, in all imaginable senses. That naturally includes the frequency spectrum, both audible and sensible (we do a lot of our hearing haptically in the low and sub-low ranges). As I've learned to compose largely through an intensive and extensive listening interaction with the world, those low frequencies are a 'natural' part of my sonic palette.

OL - a bunch of stuff(1980-2020) features excerpts which are often quite a bit shorter than your full compositions and releases, your full releases often feature long single compositions or a collection of shorter compositions making up one full "untitled" album release, besides these you've also released a few released a few albums which span several hour up til a full day worth of listening. In the compilation context and with the albums featuring shorter compositions the whole listening experience flows in an intriguing manner at times, with some pieces having a hard cut at the end rather than a fade-out or silence, this can have the effect at times of sudden realization of the composition's finite state within the album. Additionally, releases that span multiple hours can have the effect of the listener's listening mode moving from a focussed listening to a state in between listening and the sounds seeping into the subconscious of the listener creating certain emotions or triggering memories, What is your approach in selecting compositions for the albums and compilation releases, taking into account the listener experience? And further zooming in on time disappearing from our perception as we're fully focussed on the sounds, especially when listening to your multi-hour releases, is there a difference in terms of creating these extended-length releases to your other albums and compilation, relating to the listening experience you present?

FL - I like to be compositionally free to work with time. Traditional limitations like the length of a record or a radio show shouldn't limit our adventures in creative listening. To me, mega-long compositions (i.e., 24-hour or longer, like some of my pieces) generate micro-worlds of sonic experience that suggest a different kind of listening -one that gets closer to a form of 'inhabiting sound', which is tremendously suggestive. Different people will approach such extensions in varied ways, but I believe they always generate an unusual and fruitful potential for a very different, interesting and appealing experience of sonic matter as space and as time.

Many thanks to Francisco López for sending over the physical release as well as answering these questions and sharing such inspiring insights. Before we dive into the analyses of the separate parts as well as thoughts on my favourites tracks on this compilation I’ll mention what you can expect from the physical version of a bunch of stuff (1980-2020). Like most of Francisco’s releases the focus is all on the music and immersive sonic experience itself, so the USB business card itself features quite minimalistic design combined with a lovely photo of fire however. The content of the USB business card itself is a liner notes PDF file as well as the full compilation with 15 folders making up all the parts. Every folder contains the tracks as lossless 16-bit/44.1kHz CD quality files. While the best listening experience of Francisco Lopez’ work is by going into the compositions with a fully clear mind without knowing in advance what to expect in terms of a description or listings of sources used, the liner notes file does list the sound sources for some some of the tracks although Francisco isn’t getting specific about what these exactly consist of so beside the credits and tracklist parts not spoiling anything these source details are still staying cryptic enough to not reveal the workings behind the magic of Francisco’s compositions. Let’s now dive into a bunch of stuff (1980-2020).

a bunch of stuff (1980-2020) starts with first part All In. All In features a collection of pieces that mix various compositional approaches López takes together, with the All In being appropriate as “maximalist” pieces in terms of density of the sound matter or layering. In terms of sound matter I spotted bird and cicadas but there are also some “hidden” melodies in some of these pieces, either through certain resonances within the sound layers used or as series of tones that peek through the textures. López’ signature very low sub bass frequencies (also mentioned in my mini-interview and subtle glitches also appear within these pieces. In my favourite track 2012 - With_In [excerpt] López brings us an eerie tapestry of mysterious swirling resonant wheezing sound that flutters left and right, makes percussive shifting clicks to the left and right side and appears as this cloud of shaky sonic matter we are floating in ourselves. The perspective shifts from within (no pun intended) the sound matter to looking at this matter from a distance but the general experience is definitely very much grounded within the sound itself. The aforementioned hidden melodies appear in this piece too, in the form of hollow resonant diffuse tones that add this mysterious ambience of uncertainty to the emotional situation that might arise from our being in this environment. Whilst quick shifts do occur in some of Francisco’s compositions, the gradual continuous nature of this piece definitely helps the subtle shifting of focus within the layers of sounds as well letting the sonic matter work onto your mind in a certain meditative state. Delusional Cinematic follows, which features chopped up, at times quite abrasive collage like compositions of various sound matter including environmental sounds, movie sounds and music fragments. At times the compositions are stylistically comparable to Noise in their uncompromising more harsher edged nature. The pieces also feature rather clever transitions making for listening experiences that are as captivating as films or TV series themselves but in this case the imagery is purely mind-created.The strengths of my favourite track 2017 - untitled #360 [excerpt] are both in the silent brooding atmosphere of the composition within this longer 10:27 minutes excerpt and the way it progresses from one situation to the other. Starting from this eerie minimalist situation featuring quite a lot of shifting, rustling and clicking high pitched sonic matter there is something quite eerie about the idle space in between the sounds which creates a bit of a vacuum effect within the space and the at times wildly varying spectra and panning of the sounds themselves makes for quite some disjointed bits and pieces being scattered around this space as well, feels quite like being in a medieval village whilst sounds appear and disappear out of nowhere. In its second phase the piece moves into a battlefield of wild low frequency laden combat, helicopter whirling, a lot of (gun)shots and a further brooding mass of low frequency rumbling following up the first phase’s more resonant metallic waves of lower pitched sound. The transition from the battle to the dive underwater in which the battle can still be heard but in a more muffled state is one of my favourite aspects from this piece as it does add such a natural flow to the aural narrative this conjures up in my mind. I’d say this piece does mix Francisco’s more purely textural qualities with an inspired sense of rapid-cut composition making this one of his pieces which you can listen to through filtering and diving into its layers as well as letting your mind make up its own story through the progression from phase to phase within the composition. The next part Drone World features Drone pieces in the sense of especially hypnotic high frequency streams of sound, rhythmic sounding environmental sound matter as well as low bass frequencies and resonances. My favourite piece on this part is 1992 - Hypogeion [excerpt]. The piece is noticeably quite a bit louder than the other compositions before it on this part and whilst Francisco is clearly not trying to make a composition in a traditional manner this piece stylistically does remind me of 90’s Tribal Ambient, albeit in a more improvised manner. Featuring an array of highly resonant and bassy mallet tones as well as reverberant tribal style percussion the except of this piece showcases a particularly intense part of the composition moving into a more laid-back sustained phase. Somewhere in between mysterious factory and Egyptian pyramid sonics it features some excellent mixtures of dense tonal layers blending into each other with the overtones creating diffuse and at times dissonant interactions of sound. The percussive elements are quite high pitched throughout with quite some crystal like sounds flowing throughout the sonic space like grains of silver but overall the layers of sound flow much more like rippling shuddering waves that are often shifting from interlocking to interfering creating that always captivating element of mystery within Francisco López’ compositions. Afterwards in the Lo-Fi Broad-Band Tape Noiselationism part we have Noise oriented pieces made up of collages of sound matter of an Industrial and more organic nature as well as AM radio sourced sounds in compositions that feature some sweet droning and rhythmic sub bass frequencies. The pieces are more minimalist in terms of composition but equally captivating and showcase the more extreme side of López oldest works. My favourite track 1983 - untitled (1983) [excerpt] features most of the aforementioned elements. It’s a raw, lo-fi composition made up of various layers of electronic signals broadcast over shortwave radio with its beginning being the most recognisable in terms of source. However as always with Francisco’s compositions, the immersive experience is much more important than trying to further analyze what the actual sounds are and in this case it’s a particularly physical listening experience. The sound is grainy and often artefact laden, filled with hiss and sharp frequencies and in this fragment there is some kind of pattern of tones recognisable within its first half, as a whole however it sounds more like flying through an electric interference laden sky in which bits of metal are swirling around you in this cloud of disturbance and interference. Unlike some of the other 1980s composition excerpts on this compilation however this piece features a few hard cuts and changes to different clouds of fragile sound. Whilst being a continuous stream of hissy sound matter the piece eventually breaks up into shards of sharp irregular shaped sound movements until the fade-out. It’s definitely quite noisy in a way but I feel it’s also quite organic as all of Francisco’s works are, the sounds flow as freely as nature does and never feel artificial compared to what generally is considered as natural sounds. Following part Medium With No Message moves through various types of recording and playback medium based compositions both analogue and digital but actually does recall a lot of the crackling sounds and resonances from Francisco’s environmental sound matter based works as well. There is some recognisable glitch work in the last piece however but this again sounds more crystalline like than the at times clinical sounding works by other Glitch oriented artists. When we look at my favourite piece on this part 2002 - untitled #128 we find a piece that is minimalist in terms of its textural density. Quite like a breeze of wind subtly increasing in intensity, crackles, ticks, pops and other little grains of sound matter gradually build up a subtle rustling cloud of sound accompanied by mysterious tonal elements. Just like the diffuse spectrum of a light shower combined with how you can sense a lot of details in these sounds within quieter environments this piece offers a lot of depth, ever-changing bits of sounds within the subtly intertwined layers as the fluid qualities of the sound grip your ears and mind in a both intriguing and enjoyable manner. In the following part Mutated Locations we can find pieces based on environmental sound matter which are evolved into repeating rhythms, strange resonances as well as eerie and metallic layers of sound. The first few pieces carry Francisco’s darker Industrial like sonic approach to composition whilst pieces later on within the track list have a lighter (cleaner) sound and utilise the sub bass frequencies in a more intense manner as well as featuring less audible techniques of evolving sound matter. Whilst Francisco’s compositions aren’t really dark, I do often get a pretty eerie feeling from some pieces which I do like a lot and the more directly hitting approach of some of the compositions works better than the forced subtlety that some other sound artists would try to keep within their compositions. In my favourite track on this part, 2014 - untitled #321 [excerpt] we have a rather gripping flow of events. Just like the other tracks surrounding this one there’s quite a lot of depth in this piece and the imagery conjured up in my mind by this composition also particularly feels like looking at this sonic environment from above. As I felt this piece, it’s like a mass of clattering and shifting sounds as well as rather high pitched details quickly increasing in intensity as the layers demand more and more attention culminating into some particularly spooking train whistle like tones which keep hanging in the air at the end of this except until fade-out. The whole track feels quite like exploring one of these areas in which unused train carriages are stored, some of which rusting and degrading away until we’re suddenly transported to a used railway in which a brownish grey transport train is just about heading our way. Then on the following part Nice Noise we indeed have a collection of Noise styled compositions by Francisco which ranges from early metallic sound matter collages forming streams of layered Noise to more glitchy and granulated sounds in later tracks, cleaner hissy sounds with the last track blending these elements together in a similar way like pieces on the All In part. This last track, 2020 - untitled #380 [except] is also my favourite piece from this part. With Francisco combining various approaches from the 4 decades he is active by now within this piece he also created a very captivating mysterious sonic environment within this piece which is less abstract than other pieces but makes for a very unique listening experience with its combination of environmental sounds and brooding hypnotic tones. It’s quite like this dream about a cold dark forest you find yourself in which is “breathing” as one entity, with the animals providing soundtracks to this process of breathing through the hissy and hollow sounds they produce, the strange low thumps at the end, further thicken the surreal plot of this sonic story. Non-Representational Environmental Sound Matter is the part that follows and is in a way similar to Mutated Locations in terms of selection but inverts the compositional approach by showcasing Francisco’s environmental sound matter pieces with less extreme evolution within the sound matter itself but instead use some great layering, unpredictable structures and amplification creating immersive listening experiences in which some sounds are still recognizable at times but form elements within newly composed environments that are like the title says different from just reality. The excerpts on this part are also longer and feature more gradual progressions within which makes for more meditative like listening experiences as you shift your focus through the various layers within. My favourite piece in here is 2011 - Hyper-Rainforest [except]. It’s the longest excerpt Francisco has taken from any piece on this compilation but it’s also especially good that he’s selected a long part of it in the editing process as it’s a rather subtly enveloping composition. There’s a lot of sonic details of the rainforest you can pick up in this one, especially the many different animals within the rainforest, but also various other natural environmental sounds. One of the best things about the way this piece is composed however is the combination of shifting layers with an almost narrative like progression of sonic situations and directions, but all the while staying within the same sonic universe, giving us the ability to travel without moving, but in a different sense. I found it particularly enjoyable to shift through listening modes, at times spotting certain sounds, at other times taking in the effect of the entities within the sound matter and letting the fabric of each of this work on mind as well as sense of depth in the sonic space through listening. Indeed through the shifting layers you also start to sense the location of certain sounds within the depth of the piece as at times having a strangely reverberating acoustic distance to them whilst still sounding as being in the same sonic universe making for a quite magical listen. The progression of the piece towards the rain shower which abruptly ends into a sudden quiet section of soft chirping sounds adds a radio play like narrative element to the piece too as Francisco provides a bit of a frame for the behaviour of all sonic elements within the piece as certain changes that appear within this environment. It heightens the immersion too as not only do the changes make your part of the sonic universe, but they also point towards the deeper subconscious effects of streams of full spectrum sound matter like rain and the many layers of diffusion hidden around the centre of it. In the following part Sonic Seeds and Mega-Evolution Francisco utilises sonic seeds, which sound similar in approach to grains of sound to sculpt mostly unrecognisable sound matter into richly resonant, metallic and often glitchy forms. This part starts with an amalgamation of layers of sonic matter, after which the pieces grow ever more rhythmic and at times recognisably melodic in a way. The results of this sonic approach are somewhat similar to some pieces in the Nice Noise part but in this case the compositions are showcasing more of Francisco’s abstract Glitch like works, differing from his compositions grounded in environmental sonic matter but still bearing some similarities with the organic sound matter in terms of crackling clicks and the usage of high frequency sound. My favourite piece on this part is 2020 - untitled #383 [excerpt] and this one is a particularly glitchy composition. Following a nice gradual progression throughout this excerpt, the composition builds from a cloud of metallic crackles to a final section of glowing droning tones. All throughout we can dive into the various layers of clicky and mostly pointy sound matter that make up the framework of sonic actions that make up this composition feeling somewhere between machinery rhythms and liquid organic matter. The buzzing glitched “bass” tones make for a great ground of the framework, driving the composition forward with quite rumbling low frequencies which when combined with the glowing tones of the final section make for a quite intriguing combination of abstracted rhythmic sound and glowing diffuse sound combined within the same sonic universe. It does remind me a bit of Autechre as well in terms of approach, although in a less chaotic and more organic manner. Afterwards in the part Soundtracks With No Real Subservience we can listen to a selection of soundtrack pieces by Francisco, composed for various films, including art films and documentary. Moving from intense Noise like compositions towards less abrasive compositions featuring concrete and environmental sound matter, Francisco works with sounds within a more narrative type of fashion with the pace of the compositions being quicker and having more of an emotional edge to them. There’s also some more division in sections audible within these pieces as well as the darker qualities of environmental sound matter. In my favourite piece 2016 - Anima Ardens [excerpt] we are presented with another intriguing situation as the piece combines quite peaceful organic sound matter with layers of metallic clangs as well as a brooding diffuse tonal cloud hanging in the air. Quite like finding a mysterious wooden house which is also used as a metal workshop the juxtaposition also makes it feel quite like roaming around in the forest at night. The sharp swirls and clicking sounds, combined with the hollow tones and clangs instantly conjure up quite some magical imagery as these elements start to blend into each other as well as change or fade out whilst remaining a continuous flow of sound keeping its grip on you within the sonic universe. Next part The Ultra-Quiet, Not Conceptual features some of Francisco's quietest pieces. Indeed these are excerpts from his pieces that feature quite a lot of very quiet sound matter and silence moving from a hollow resonant flow of sound to soft rustling and clicks to some surprisingly intense sections of sub-bass frequencies in later pieces within this part. These sub-bass frequency section do also feature in my favourite piece on this part, 2013 - untitled #309 [excerpt] and in this case they’re accompanied by muffled mysterious drones that fade into soft-focus out of the silence. Like most pieces on this parts it’s a very subtle listening experience best listened to on good speakers, including a subwoofer or headphones with a good bass response to properly hear the subtle sonics Francisco builds up in her creep out of their corners. Afterwards on the next part VirtuAural Machines Francisco zooms in on his machinery based pieces. The part features a mixture of approaches to the sonic experience of machinery itself moving from relatively rough softly saturated Industrial like pieces to the usage of percussive mechanical elements to create hypnotic sonic framework as well as eerie sonic universes made up of huge halls filled with heavy clangs of equipment, siren like diffuse, distant tones and pointy and hissy sonics blending together into enveloping streams of sound around us. Whilst some of the sources on this part are at times recognisable in a way, there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had once again by the strange textural qualities of the sound matter as these entities in themselves have a particular enjoyable quality within them here, which is helped by the often spacious panning within the compositions. Favourite piece 1990 - Fango de Euriptéridos [excerpt] utilises the aforementioned spacious panning rather well and also amplifies another aspect of machinery in that it’s based a lot around shimmering tonal resonances reverberating through a large spaces rather than emphasising the (harsh) hissing and repetitive elements of machinery. It features various types of sonic actions but the general sonic focus is on this warm glowing mass of resonance that vibrates in certain ways as well, creating shifting droning tones that seem to make the floor vibrate as well. A quite “temple” like approach to an Industrial sonic universe. Following part Within The Noosphere features a rather different kind of compositions by Francisco in that most of these pieces are built up out of many layers of other music, which are evolved in various manners. Moving from pretty intense tape collages to tumbling Plunderphonics Metal barrages to the rather amusing wailing stretched tones of the old song sampled of a vinyl recorded on the last track it’s Francisco’s compositional work at its most structurally and sonically disruptive. Favourite piece 1994 - Concert for 300 Magnetic Tapes [excerpt] feels quite like a mountain landscape built out of many types of sonic matter. Most matter used within this piece is quite noisy, quirky and quite explosive too but the general fuzzy and crumbling nature of all these bits combined does still conjured up this curious imagery of a mountain landscape made up of sonic material. Recognisably musical and human sounds are at times still audible in between the cracks of the mass of sound, but in a subtle way. The following part Xeno-Instruments features a selection of Francisco’s “acoustic” pieces, in the sense that some of the compositions do feature acoustic musical instruments, at times without much audible post-production. The results are quite mysterious as can be expected from Francisco’s approach, feeling quite like the sound of the earth crust being broken open, sharp clouds of buzzing sonics, thundering percussion rhythms and wooden rumbles travelling through the room. Indeed most of the time it’s not even audible that there are actual acoustic instruments used, which is definitely the quality of Francisco’s work in that he consistently keeps evolving the sonic universes he conjures up and can find richness, “alien” new elements as well as captivating details though any method of composition and with any sound matter he finds making for a very solid but still diverse body of work. The aforementioned wooden rumbles feature in my favourite piece 2011 - untitled #275 [excerpt]. Built up out of rhythmic elements, low rumbles as well as diffused spooky tones the piece progresses in a subtle and deep manner. There’s this great metallic bell like clang that creates regular accents in the first half of this excerpt filling the room with rich resonance periodically. The rhythmically moving wooden elements form irregular patterns that do follow a certain scheme of sections in terms of there appearance and are spiky but also somewhat dampened in nature. Strangely reverberating tones almost form a diffuse melody in the second half which then moves into a brooding cloud of tonal sonic matter. It’s the kind of piece that feels somewhere in between your room starting to create its own sonic universe as well as the sonic picture of an abandoned wooden windmill’s mechanical sounds of past activity. Final part Yes, Humans features compositions that all feature recognisable human sounds or traces of these in various manners moving from amusing locally recorded environmental sound matter to layered children’s choir recordings and a further direction of ever more evolved and abstract sound matter culminating in one of Francisco's most recent compositions (from the last few years) on the final track. This final part quite nicely compiles Francisco's approaches in a way, as radio play like recordings moving in the ever more mysterious abstract and at times cinematic sonics of Francisco’s later works. My favourite track here is the rather short but sweet 1992 - Sofia [excerpt]. In nature is more straight-forward than other pieces on this part but I do find the juxtaposition and sounds themselves within this piece rather nice. It starts with a TV recording of some kind of Soviet TV commercial which sounds all cosy and sweet but afterwards cuts to this Russian Orthodox(?) church in which can hear chants. I especially do like this combination as the commercial seems to recall the memories of the Soviet Union in perhaps a bit overly rosy manner while the church sounds totally loose from anything that might conjure up bad memories and sounds much more peaceful in a way. The way you can hear Francisco walking around the church as well as all kinds of extra noises including a loud cough, footsteps and muffled talking adds to the amusing nature of this piece. The lo-fi nature of the recording also makes the chants themselves feel more like a cloud of tonal sonic matter as syllables get a bit drowned out in the recording. Francisco López’ a bunch of stuff (1980-2020) is an excellent compilation showcasing a great selection of Francisco’s rich discography of compositions which by now reach over 40 years. Full of immersive, uncompromising sonics this compilation is a rewarding listen for anyone who wants to get into Francisco’s music and wants to have a curated overview of his discography to get started diving into his full-length and shorter releases. There’s also some great material in this compilation for fans of Francisco who already have multiple of his releases as the rarer material and recent pieces offer some further sonic enjoyment and the compilation’s selection and sequencing also offers a new more mixtape style manner to enjoy Francisco’s compositions. It’s a recommended compilation for anyone who wants to get into Francisco López as well as fans of Noise, Sound Art, Tape based experimental music, Glitch as well as a uniquely personal approach to sound matter based experimental music, sonogenic composition. Definitely check this out.

You can order a copy of the physical USB business card edition here: https://www.blackhole.la/webshop/francisco-lpez-a-bunch-of-stuff-1980-2020?fbclid=IwAR3pcZfCIT-3Y7BR2M7AjTuph_3TWUm2ZHFjwmuNadir21X_imHnv9ODiZk

#polar visions amplitude #Polar Visions #compilation review #francisco lópez #a bunch of stuff (1980-2020)#mini-interview #noise #sonogenic composition #dark ambient #environmental sound matter #sound collage #plunderphonics #glitch #lowercase #immersive listening #eai #usb business card

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compneuropapers · 4 years ago

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Interesting Papers for Week 24, 2021

Prior expectations evoke stimulus-specific activity in the deep layers of the primary visual cortex. Aitken, F., Menelaou, G., Warrington, O., Koolschijn, R. S., Corbin, N., Callaghan, M. F., & Kok, P. (2020). PLOS Biology, 18(12), e3001023.

Using the past to estimate sensory uncertainty. Beierholm, U., Rohe, T., Ferrari, A., Stegle, O., & Noppeney, U. (2020). eLife, 9, e54172.

The neural basis for a persistent internal state in Drosophila females. Deutsch, D., Pacheco, D., Encarnacion-Rivera, L., Pereira, T., Fathy, R., Clemens, J., … Murthy, M. (2020). eLife, 9, e59502.

A unified model for binocular fusion and depth perception. Ding, J., & Levi, D. M. (2021). Vision Research, 180, 11–36.

Human complex exploration strategies are enriched by noradrenaline-modulated heuristics. Dubois, M., Habicht, J., Michely, J., Moran, R., Dolan, R. J., & Hauser, T. U. (2021). eLife, 10, e59907.

Spatial Information Encoding across Multiple Neocortical Regions Depends on an Intact Hippocampus. Esteves, I. M., Chang, H., Neumann, A. R., Sun, J., Mohajerani, M. H., & McNaughton, B. L. (2021). Journal of Neuroscience, 41(2), 307–319.

Imprecise neural computations as a source of adaptive behaviour in volatile environments. Findling, C., Chopin, N., & Koechlin, E. (2021). Nature Human Behaviour, 5(1), 99–112.

Structure and function of a neocortical synapse. Holler, S., K��stinger, G., Martin, K. A. C., Schuhknecht, G. F. P., & Stratford, K. J. (2021). Nature, 591(7848), 111–116.

Visual intensity-dependent response latencies predict perceived audio–visual simultaneity. Horsfall, R., Wuerger, S., & Meyer, G. (2021). Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 100, 102471.

Optimal utility and probability functions for agents with finite computational precision. Juechems, K., Balaguer, J., Spitzer, B., & Summerfield, C. (2021). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(2).

Topographic connectivity reveals task-dependent retinotopic processing throughout the human brain. Knapen, T. (2021). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(2).

Amplitude modulations of cortical sensory responses in pulsatile evidence accumulation. Koay, S. A., Thiberge, S., Brody, C. D., & Tank, D. W. (2020). eLife, 9, e60628.

Visual adaptation to natural scene statistics and visual preference. Nguyen, L. Y., & Spehar, B. (2021). Vision Research, 180, 87–95.

Invariant timescale hierarchy across the cortical somatosensory network. Rossi-Pool, R., Zainos, A., Alvarez, M., Parra, S., Zizumbo, J., & Romo, R. (2021). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(3).

Balancing control: A Bayesian interpretation of habitual and goal-directed behavior. Schwöbel, S., Marković, D., Smolka, M. N., & Kiebel, S. J. (2021). Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 100, 102472.

Subcircuits of Deep and Superficial CA1 Place Cells Support Efficient Spatial Coding across Heterogeneous Environments. Sharif, F., Tayebi, B., Buzsáki, G., Royer, S., & Fernandez-Ruiz, A. (2021). Neuron, 109(2), 363-376.e6.

Boosting working memory with accelerated clocks. Thönes, S., Arnau, S., Wascher, E., & Schneider, D. (2021). NeuroImage, 226, 117601.

Polarity of uncertainty representation during exploration and exploitation in ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Trudel, N., Scholl, J., Klein-Flügge, M. C., Fouragnan, E., Tankelevitch, L., Wittmann, M. K., & Rushworth, M. F. S. (2021). Nature Human Behaviour, 5(1), 83–98.

Unsupervised neural network models of the ventral visual stream. Zhuang, C., Yan, S., Nayebi, A., Schrimpf, M., Frank, M. C., DiCarlo, J. J., & Yamins, D. L. K. (2021). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(3).

Are intrinsic neural timescales related to sensory processing? Evidence from abnormal behavioral states. Zilio, F., Gomez-Pilar, J., Cao, S., Zhang, J., Zang, D., Qi, Z., … Northoff, G. (2021). NeuroImage, 226, 117579.

#science #Neuroscience #computational neuroscience #neurobiology #neurons #cognition #cognitive science #psychophysics #neural networks #scientific publications #Brain science

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didanawisgi · 4 years ago

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Abstract

Magnetoreception, the perception of the geomagnetic field, is a sensory modality well-established across all major groups of vertebrates and some invertebrates, but its presence in humans has been tested rarely, yielding inconclusive results. We report here a strong, specific human brain response to ecologically-relevant rotations of Earth-strength magnetic fields. Following geomagnetic stimulation, a drop in amplitude of electroencephalography (EEG) alpha-oscillations (8–13 Hz) occurred in a repeatable manner. Termed alpha-event-related desynchronization (alpha-ERD), such a response has been associated previously with sensory and cognitive processing of external stimuli including vision, auditory and somatosensory cues. Alpha-ERD in response to the geomagnetic field was triggered only by horizontal rotations when the static vertical magnetic field was directed downwards, as it is in the Northern Hemisphere; no brain responses were elicited by the same horizontal rotations when the static vertical component was directed upwards. This implicates a biological response tuned to the ecology of the local human population, rather than a generic physical effect. Biophysical tests showed that the neural response was sensitive to static components of the magnetic field. This rules out all forms of electrical induction (including artifacts from the electrodes) which are determined solely on dynamic components of the field. The neural response was also sensitive to the polarity of the magnetic field. This rules out free-radical “quantum compass” mechanisms like the cryptochrome hypothesis, which can detect only axial alignment. Ferromagnetism remains a viable biophysical mechanism for sensory transduction and provides a basis to start the behavioral exploration of human magnetoreception.

Significance Statement

Although many migrating and homing animals are sensitive to Earth’s magnetic field, most humans are not consciously aware of the geomagnetic stimuli that we encounter in everyday life. Either we have lost a shared, ancestral magnetosensory system, or the system lacks a conscious component with detectable neural activity but no apparent perceptual awareness by us. We found two classes of ecologically-relevant rotations of Earth-strength magnetic fields that produce strong, specific and repeatable effects on human brainwave activity in the electroencephalography (EEG) alpha-band (8–13 Hz); EEG discriminates in response to different geomagnetic field stimuli. Biophysical tests rule out all except the presence of a ferromagnetic transduction element, such as biologically-precipitated crystals of magnetite (Fe3O4).

General discussion

As noted above, many past attempts have been made to test for the presence of human magnetoreception using behavioral assays, but the results were inconclusive. To avoid the cognitive and behavioral artifacts inherent in testing weak or subliminal sensory responses, we decided to use EEG techniques to see directly whether or not the human brain has passive responses to magnetic field changes. Our results indicate that human brains are indeed collecting and selectively processing directional input from magnetic field receptors. These give rise to a brain response that is selective for field direction and rotation with a pattern of neural activity that is measurable at the group level and repeatable in strongly-responding individuals...

Conclusion

Our results indicate that at least some modern humans transduce changes in Earth-strength magnetic fields into an active neural response. We hope that this study provides a road-map for future studies aiming to replicate and extend research into human magnetoreception. Given the known presence of highly-evolved geomagnetic navigation systems in species across the animal kingdom, it is perhaps not surprising that we might retain at least some functioning neural components especially given the nomadic hunter/gatherer lifestyle of our not-too-distant ancestors. The full extent of this inheritance remains to be discovered.

#magnetoreception #quantum compass #alpha-ERD #biogenic magnetite #endogenous electromagnetic field induction #Geomagnetic Field #grounding #quantum biology #quantum consciousness #Neuroscience #science #brain waves

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marketreportss · 3 years ago

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What is the Coherent Optical Equipment ?

“According to this latest study, Coherent Optical Equipment Market size is projected to reach USD 34.7 Billion by 2027 from an estimated USD 19.12 Billion in 2020, growing at a CAGR of 8.9% globally”.

Coherent Optical Equipment allows fiber optic cables to transmit more information using light amplitude and phase modulation and transmission with two polarizations. Coherent Optics also offers higher bitrates, higher flexibility, simpler photonic piping systems, and better optical performance by using digital signal processing in both transmitters and receivers. It's a web-scale world that enables on-demand content, bandwidth-intensive mobile apps, high-definition video streaming, and new cloud-based IT applications to deliver heavy traffic and unpredictable traffic patterns. Coherent Optical Equipment provides network capacity is increasing by 25-50% each year, and systems operating at 10 Gbps cannot cope with this rapid scalability. Coherent optics solves the capacity problems faced by network operators. It takes the common 1s and 0s (blinking light in fiber) of a digital signal, uses advanced technology to modulate the amplitude and phase of that light, and sends the signal to each of the two polarized lights which can transmit data at high speed. Thus, Coherent Optical Equipment Market showcases the high growth prospects in the global market.

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Leading Key Players Covered in Coherent Optical Equipment market:

Ciena Corporation,Cisco Systems Inc,Eci Telecom,Fujitsu Limited,Huawei Technologies Ltd,Infinera Corporation,Nec Corporation,Nokia Corporation,Telefonaktiebolaget Lm Ericsson (Ericsson),Zte Corporation,Adva Optical Networking,Carl Zeiss Meditec,Zygo Corporation,Vision Engineering Ltd.

These companies are devising key strategies such as acquisitions, merges, collaborations, partnerships, new product launches, regional expansions, and targeting untapped markets to gain competitive advantage over other players working in the market.

Introspective Market Research offers a comprehensive overview of the market through the analysis of key parameters such as revenue, price, competition, and promotions, as well as the study, synthesis, and summarization of data from different sources. It analyzes the leading industry drivers and shows numerous market components. The information offered is thorough, dependable, and the result of a comprehensive primary and secondary study. Introspective Market Research reports offer a comprehensive global market as well as an in-depth strategic sourcing methodology and analysis based on qualitative and quantitative research to anticipate market growth.

Segmentation of Coherent Optical Equipment market:

By Type:

Modules/ /Chips, Optical Amplifiers, Optical Switches, Wavelength-division Multiplexer (WDM),Others

By Application:

OEM’s, Data Centers, Networking, Others

Geographic Segment Covered in the Report

North America (U.S., Canada, Mexico)

Europe (Germany, U.K., France, Italy, Russia, Spain, Rest of Europe)

Asia-Pacific (China, India, Japan, Southeast Asia, Rest of APAC)

Middle East & Africa (GCC Countries, South Africa, Rest of MEA)

South America (Brazil, Argentina, Rest of South America)

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Market forecast analysis through recent trends and SWOT analysis

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Market segmentation analysis, including qualitative and quantitative studies that include economic and non-economic impacts

Coherent Optical Equipment Market Regional and country-level analysis that integrates demand and supply forces that impact the growth of the market.

Competitive environment related to the Coherent Optical Equipment market share for key players, along with new projects and strategies that players have adopted over the past five years

IMR NEWS:

· https://heraldkeeper.com/news/raw-meat-speciation-testing-market-2022-business-demand-market-share-trend-business-news-business-growth-prime-key-players-of-domestic-and-global-market-2028-with-top-countries-data-2012210.html

· https://heraldkeeper.com/news/intelligent-hearing-protection-and-communication-systems-market-revenue-status-and-outlook-swot-study-key-manufacturers-types-and-application-forecast-by-2028-2012319.html

#Coherent Optical Equipment Market #Coherent Optical Equipment Market share #Coherent Optical Equipment Market size #Coherent Optical Equipment Market growth

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mariaajoness · 5 years ago

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Coherent Optical Equipment Market Qualitative Analysis Reveals explosive growth by 2026

Data Bridge Market Research has provides the Qualitative and informative knowledge by adding titled “Coherent Optical Equipment Market by By Technology (100G, 200G, 400G+, 400G ZR), Equipment (Wavelength-Division Multiplexer, Modules/Chips, Test and Measurement Equipment, Optical Amplifiers, Optical Switches, Others), Application (Networking, Data Center, OEMs), End Use (Service Provider, Public Sector, Industries), Geography (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Europe, South America, Middle East and Africa) Analysis and Forecast, 2019 – 2026”. In this report, Researchers have analyzed Strength, Weakness, opportunities and threats in the market and provides the unbiased picture of the market with the Qualitative and informative knowledge. The Coherent Optical Equipment Market report additionally states import/trade utilization, free market activity figures, cost, value, volume and gross edges.

Few of the leading organizations’ names are listed here- Ciena Corporation, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Cisco Systems, Inc., Nokia Corporation, Infinera Corporation, FUJITSU OPTICAL COMPONENTS LIMITED, ECI TELECOM, ZTE Corporation, ADVA Optical Networking, Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson

Global coherent optical equipment market is growing at a substantial CAGR of 9.4% during the forecast period of 2019 to 2026 due to demand for high quality audio & visuals.

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Market Definition: Global Coherent Optical Equipment Market

Coherent optical equipment is the optical cable equipment that promotes 100G+ velocity for information transmission efficiently. Substantial increases in bandwidth demands to minimize latency issues and provide smooth transmission of information / data is expected to drive consistent market trends in the expected timeline for optical equipment. Coherent Optical Transmission uses amplitude and light phase modulation along with transmission across two polarizations to allow more data to be transmitted via fiber optic cable

The Global Coherent Optical Equipment Market is segmented by

Global Coherent Optical Equipment Market By Technology (100G, 200G, 400G+, 400G ZR)

Equipment (Wavelength-Division Multiplexer, Modules/Chips, Test and Measurement Equipment, Optical Amplifiers, Optical Switches, Others)

Application (Networking, Data Center, OEMs)

End Use (Service Provider, Public Sector, Industries)

Regional analysis for Coherent Optical Equipment Market includes:

North America

Latin America

Europe

Asia Pacific & Japan

The Middle East and Africa

Major companies covered in the report

Some of the major players operating global coherent optical equipment market are Ciena Corporation, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Cisco Systems, Inc., Nokia Corporation, Infinera Corporation, FUJITSU OPTICAL COMPONENTS LIMITED, ECI TELECOM, ZTE Corporation, ADVA Optical Networking, Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, NEC Corporation, Carl Zeiss Meditec, Vision Engineering Ltd, S-T Industries Inc., Third Dimension, Zygo Corporation among others.

This Report Consists of:

No of pages: 350

No of Figures: 60

No of Tables: 220

Recent Developments in the Market:

In January 2017, Infinera Corporation launched the XTS-3300 and XTS-3600 subsea network meshponders and upgraded its DTN-X XTC series with a fresh 1.2 Tb / s subsea line card to 12 terabits per second (Tb / s) of non-blocking optical transport network (OTN). This will help the company increase its innovation and increase the sales by generating great revenue

In 2017, CableLabs launched an Innovation Project for Full Duplex Coherent Optics the new optic has a capability of more than 100 times each existing cable access network fiber will significantly increase the value of the currently-deployed fiber infrastructure in the company

Why to purchase this report?

Following are the reasons to consider this Coherent Optical Equipment Market report:

This ultimate guide will help you stay ahead in market as it furnishes you with the profiles of the key market players and their working methodologies and their decision making capabilities.

The report analyzes various factors which act as drivers and restraints to development the overall Coherent Optical Equipment Market.

This report not only analyzes present market condition but it likewise estimates how the Coherent Optical Equipment Market is going to perform for estimated time period of 2019-2026.

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homedevises · 6 years ago

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Seven Reasons Why People Like Garden Of Eden Perfume Oils | garden of eden perfume oils

“When I was 20 years old I had a awful dream that able one of my ancient achievement series. In the dream, I opened a debris can and saw myself naked in a fetal position with bisected my beard shaved. I looked bottomward into the can and affiliated eyes with myself. Afterwards that dream, every time I anesthetized by a mirror, I absurd bisected of my beard baldheaded off. So I did a alternation of pieces for bisected a year based on that dream.”

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The dreamer speaking is artisan Alex Grey, who for added than 35 years has been at the beginning of the abstracted art field. Alex, however, hasn’t been abandoned in this journey. In 1975, while accessory the Academy of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he met his constant partner, artisan Allyson Rymland Grey, and the two accept been afire trails in the abstracted art association anytime since. But their access has able abundant added into the realms of accepted culture. Alex’s consciousness-expanding creations accept been acclimated by artists including Meshuggah, Nirvana, Beastie Boys and David Byrne. In 1999, Alex’s assignment bent the absorption of Apparatus guitarist Adam Jones. Afterwards affair at one of Alex’s art exhibitions, the two “struck up a friendship,” which eventually led them to coact on the iconic artwork for Tool’s Lateralus, 10,000 Days and more.

Allyson Grey in her flat at CoSM

photograph by Carlos Jamarillo

The seeds of the Greys’ appalling analysis of assignment can be traced aback to the couple’s aboriginal consciousness-expanding affair in Boston, and their aboriginal “sacramental journeys” on LSD. As the Greys connected to deepen their airy affiliation and artistic consciousness, Alex was additionally exploring the anatomical realms while alive in Harvard Medical School’s analysis department, area he able cadavers for dissection. He afterwards active on as a analysis technologist with mind-body anesthetic antecedents Dr. Herbert Benson and Dr. Joan Borysenko to advice investigate healing energies. Alex’s mind/body/spirit explorations would eventually apparent in his iconic “Sacred Mirrors” alternation — 21 active life-sized paintings that appraise the coaction amid the body’s concrete and airy anatomy. Alex eventually went on to acquaint Artistic Analysis and Amount Carve at New York University, afterwards which, he and Allyson began teaching abstracted art workshops worldwide.

Since their aboriginal meeting, the Greys accept had abounding transformative experiences, but one decidedly cardinal moment occurred in 1985, when, according to Allyson, “the eyes came to both of us accompanying of a allowance apartment the ‘Sacred Mirror’ paintings. This became the adventure of our life: to analysis the Chapel of Angelic Mirrors. CoSM has been a … nonprofit aback 1996, and an interfaith abbey aback 2008. Countless friends, artists and artisans are co-creating this airy center. CoSM ceremoniousness the Mystical Acquaintance portrayed in abstracted artworks aggressive by claimed acquaintance with Divinity.”

The latest affiliate in this adventure is the architecture of Entheon (meaning, “A abode to ascertain the Creator within”). The three-story structure, which is currently actuality congenital on the Greys’ acreage in New York’s Hudson Valley, will be CoSM’s art sanctuary. Aback completed, it will affection a striking, white-and-bronze sculptural exoteric advised by Alex depicting airy motifs from his paintings as able-bodied as representations of Adam and Eve abiding to the Garden of Eden.

“[We] will affectation the ‘Sacred Mirrors’ in a appropriate Chapel room. Twelve thousand aboveboard anxiety of exhibition amplitude will affectation key works of the CoSM abiding accumulating and baddest iconic originals of the all-around abstracted art movement,” says Allyson. “Entheon’s three-story abstracted art environment, will accommodate originals from the best outstanding abstracted artists worldwide, art that ceremoniousness the alluringly aggressive accomplishments of painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, performers of all kinds, art as a airy aisle to advance consciousness.”

Allyson and Alex Grey with calibration archetypal of Entheon

photograph by Carlos Jaramillo

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My own claimed history with Alex and Allyson began in June 2015, in a ambagious way, through philosopher and longtime acquaintance of the Greys, Ken Wilber. Ken wrote the advanced to my book, Everything Mind: What I’ve Abstruse About Hard Knocks, Airy Awakening, and the Mind-Blowing Accuracy of It All, and apprenticed the Greys to apprehend it. Alex had some absolute affectionate words to say (“Chris Grosso’s boxy activity acquaint acquaint his no-bullshit adherence in Everything Mind. A angelic atrocity is in the affection of awakening, Chris takes us there and shares abstracted accoutrement to deepen with.”) and the Greys arrive me to advise a branch at CoSM on Activation Your True Spirit, in which I discussed how to breed a airy activation out of arduous activity adventures through benevolence and meditation.

As a musician, whenever accessible I additionally absorb a alive ambient guitar brainwork at the end of my sessions. That black at CoSM I played for about 25 minutes. What I didn’t apperceive was, during that time, Alex and Allyson snuck into the aback of the allowance to watch. Once the guitar brainwork was over, Alex approached me and, in a absolute soft, about bashful accent of voice, said, “That was beautiful. I achievement you don’t apperception but I did some sketches of you while you played.” He afresh presented the bristles assets he’d done. Somewhat stunned, I could alone aggregation up a simple “thank you” in return.

The affair is, that’s Alex and Allyson. They are two of the best present, apprehensive and cellophane bodies I accept anytime met. Their assignment has afflicted so abounding facets of life, from art to music, blur to spirituality, and much, abundant added — yet, aback they are talking to you, none of that matters. All that affairs is the three of you administration your barter in the aerial actuality and now — the absolute Oneness that we all allotment with one another. It’s a Oneness that — aback we’re still enough, if alike aloof for a abrupt moment — we can see reflected aback in audacious accuracy through the Greys’ eyes, and their abstracted art as well.

Alex Grey’s “Theologue,” 1986, acrylic on linen, 180 x 60 inches

artwork by Alex Grey

WITH THE UNITED STATES IN SUCH A DIVISIVE PLACE RIGHT NOW, WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON CREATIVE EXPRESSION AND HOW IT RELATES TO UNITY AND HEALING?ALEX GREY Artistic announcement presents a moral best to the artist. Should I activity my ego’s abhorrence and abhorrence or transcend my baby cocky and affect bodies to apprehend their college added accord through the spirit of accepted love? A lover of activity would seek for our apple the best absolute aftereffect for the greatest cardinal of active beings. The best burning antecedence charge go to the ecology affairs of stabilizing and healing the web of life. We’re beholden for the abounding ecological initiatives now underway by so abounding able people.

Any accountable can be the berry of art. Artists generally mirror the anarchy of their lives or the carelessness of the times with allegorical reflections of humanity’s darkest hours. The announcement of adumbration offers ablution and acknowledges the accuracy of misery. Look at the origins of applesauce and the blues. Suffering can accord bearing to new art forms. Aback we feel our analysis is lost, an acknowledgment of art and music restores us because we see a angelic absorption of area we are at and/or area we charge to go. Symbols that accompany opposites together, icons that affiliate polarities, can action healing in a time of cultural fragmentation.

MUSIC IS CLEARLY AN INTEGRAL PART OF YOUR VISION AND MISSION. DO YOU HAVE ANY INFLUENCES FROM THE PUNK/HARDCORE/METAL OR HIP-HOP SCENE? IF SO, DO YOU EXPERIENCE A DIFFERENT FORM OF CREATIVE EXPRESSION WHILE LISTENING TO THEM?ALEX Aback the additional Led Zeppelin anthology alone in 1969, I was admiral of my aerial academy art club and appointed a alert affair for the accumulation followed by a discussion. In 1970, at age 16, I bought the Black Sabbath anthology and admired it, but it afraid the bits out of me. I was consistently admiring to artists that appoint the adumbration in their craft. How do we accord creatively with the affections of fear, abhorrence and evil?

ALLYSON GREY I additionally had a archetype of Led Zeppelin II in 1969. Didn’t everybody? Aback the Ramones, Sex Pistols and the Clash hit, Alex and I were calm and we admired them. As benumbed hippies who had begin God, it became added harder for either of us to buy into asinine chaos, absurd abandon and misogynistic lyrics. Alex’s art was included on the Ill Communication anthology and we able the mosh pit at a Beastie Boys concert afore artifice stage-side to the VIP box. Our best abstruse absorption in the metal arena has absolutely been the music and ability of Tool.

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OFTEN THOSE WHO REJECT THE IDEA OF GOD LISTEN TO WHAT’S REFERRED TO AS “DARK” MUSIC. IT WAS ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGIST CARL JUNG WHO SAID, “ONE DOES NOT BECOME ENLIGHTENED BY IMAGINING FIGURES OF LIGHT, BUT BY MAKING THE DARKNESS CONSCIOUS.” SO WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE POLARITIES OF LIGHT AND DARK WHEN IT COMES TO MUSIC? AND HOW CAN “DARK” MUSIC PLAY INTO ONE’S SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT?ALLYSON In the affliction of the analysis of the artist, aphotic admiral can be acclimatized for artistic expression. Inwardly captivated agony and all-overs can appear from the abstract accompaniment and access an artifact. The ability of acerbity and anguish is amaranthine and ultimately self-destructive if unacknowledged. Jung accepted that the adumbration charge be chip for the cocky to transform and evolve.

The absolute Godhead is above all concepts. All words abort to butt the Great Mystery of the abstruse account of existence. Yet, the cabalistic God charge additionally ache to be known, for why abroad would the Infinite One acknowledge itself to us through the mystical acquaintance of accord with the abstracted realms? This is why the mystical acquaintance is the best healing accident in a person’s life. The cabalistic reveals itself in theophanies of the all-powerful imagination.

Without a cosmos, God cannot be accepted and admired by creatures. Every moment, God creates a amazing masterwork to amaze and affect us if we could but see it. So it is that a temple or any assignment of angelic art aboriginal appears in the apperception of the abstruse as a theophany to be shared, that God may be revealed, that the alien may be known. Artists activity to construe the eyes into absolute analysis as an alms to spirit and to boost people. Those who apperceive not God backpack the anguish of the unrevealed.

TOOL IS A BAND THAT HAS LED MANY LISTENERS TOWARD AN INTEREST IN SPIRITUALITY. ALEX, MANY PEOPLE BECAME FAMILIAR WITH YOUR ART THROUGH THEIR MUSIC. CAN YOU WALK READERS THROUGH WHAT A COLLABORATION WITH TOOL LOOKS LIKE?ALEX The action on anniversary anthology has been unique. For Lateralus, Adam had an abstraction of the anatomical overlays and afresh with a bit of feedback, he let me do my thing. I came up with the ablaze eye as a way to ablaze up the artistic centers of a person. Afterwards the success of the Lateralus album, Adam arrive me to allotment some architecture account for the date and afterwards asked me to assignment on the “Parabola” music video with him. I offered the 90-second catastrophe with the Kundalini ascendance and accident to the Accepted Apperception Lattice.

With 10,000 Days, I approved a cardinal of account and afresh I aloof showed Adam what I was alive on in the studio, the “Net of Being” painting. He accustomed the angel from a account I had apparent him years before, and he admired it immediately. He was creating top abstruse 3D photos and got me to assignment with 3D modelers to achieve faster anatomical figures. Adam is consistently blame artists to analyze new territory. I adulation Adam and all the men of Tool.

Tool consistently challenges and pushes their artistic bend with anniversary new album, summoning the zeitgeist into a advancing and accurate sonic mirror. Their record, 10,000 Days, is symphonic. Both affliction and arete are apparent in their work. Thanks to Adam Jones’ adroit genius, the celebrated packaging of the 10,000 Days CD won a Grammy. With my painting “Net of Being” as a awning image, the 10,000 Days album, abounding of alarming music and lyrics, aural the aboriginal anniversary of release, became the No. 1 affairs album.

Alex Grey’s “Net of Being,” 2002-07, oil on linen, 90 x 180 inches

artwork by Alex Grey

When Maynard [James Keenan’s] biography, A Perfect Union of Contrary Things, was appear in 2016 he went on a book bout and included CoSM as a destination. We had an candid chat on his artistic action in the attendance of a active allowance abounding of advantageous fans. There is absolutely no added able actuality in music and winemaking than Maynard.

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Tool is endlessly adroit industrial-strength consciousness-expanding bedrock & roll. Everyone is a apparatus for something. I accept been a advantageous apparatus for the branding of the bandage with my images. We use a apparatus to achieve a assignment or purpose. Music and art are the best abstruse accoutrement altruism has for accouterments and cogent the heights and base of the soul.

Working with one of the greatest bedrock bands of all time has been a attenuate privilege, the adventure of a lifetime — alert already! I will consistently be beholden for how Apparatus alien my assignment to so abounding bodies throughout the world.

WHILE ON THE TOPIC OF TOOL, THEY’VE HAD FANS ON AN EMOTIONAL ROLLERCOASTER THESE PAST FEW YEARS WITH VARYING UPDATES ON THEIR FORTHCOMING ALBUM. WILL WE BE SEEING NEW ALEX GREY ARTWORK ACCOMPANYING ITS RELEASE?ALEX I haven’t heard any of the new music yet, and I can’t acknowledgment this question, but it is attractive positive. As far as added collaborations, there are still a few earlier things that accept never been about aggregate and I can’t say whether they anytime will, but if I get a adventitious to assignment with Apparatus again, it will be an honor.

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON EXPLORING DREAM STATES THROUGH ART? WHAT ROLES CAN NIGHTMARES HAVE IN OUR SPIRITUAL AWAKENING?ALEX The aboriginal compositional elements of the painting “Transfigurations” came to me in a dream in 1993. Later, in a DMT experience, I became the amount in the dream painting. My analysis was fabricated of a filigree of ablaze with jewels abeyant throughout. This crystalized the angel in alertness for authoritative the absolute painting.

ALLYSON Alex says, “The accountable of an artist’s assignment is their best important consideration.” If an artisan remembers dreams and nightmares, surely, exploring that adumbration through art can be a affluent treasure. I’ve been an artisan all my activity and accept kept abounding volumes of my dream journal. At age 12, I began painting actively in my attic, advised art through alum academy and accept been practicing art about every day since. I do not anamnesis basing a painting or cartoon on a dream or nightmare. For over 40 years, the antecedent of my adumbration has consistently sprung from a acquainted close articulation that guides the change of my painting and amusing sculpture, aggressive by consciousness-expanding visions.

details of Alex Grey and Allyson Grey’s artwork

PAINTER, SCULPTOR, TEACHER, MOTHER, MUSE TO ARTISTS WORLDWIDE: 60 SOMETHING YEARS LATER, WHO IS ALLYSON GREY?ALLYSON I am an artisan with two bodies of work: my paintings, including oils, acrylics and watercolors, and my collaborative amusing sculpture, Chapel of Angelic Mirrors, CoSM, a transdenominational, radically affable interfaith art abbey in the Hudson Valley of New York. My activity is a assignment of art. My ancestor makes me a Jew, and I adulation actuality Jewish alike admitting I do not adulation all the things Jews say or do. I am the wife of the able and able artist, Alex Grey. I am the mother of the able and able artist/performer, Zena Grey. I am a acquaintance to abounding who accompany us in the angelic assignment of architecture an constant temple to boost a all-around community.

VISIONARY ARTIST, AUTHOR, TEACHER, FATHER, VAJRAYANA PRACTITIONER: 60 SOMETHING YEARS LATER, WHO IS ALEX GREY?ALEX I am a abstruse abstracted artist, co-founder of CoSM, Chapel of Angelic Mirrors, accomplice and best acquaintance to my beloved, the artist, Allyson Grey. I am the ancestor of the outstanding artisan and actor, Zena Grey. Bags of bodies about the apple are tattooed with my art. My assignment has actually larboard an consequence on them. A porn brilliant called herself afterwards me. My art frequently apprehension up on blotter acid. I’m a apprentice of consciousness-expanding history, mysticism, analysis and angelic art traditions. For a cord of years, I fabricated it to the top of Watkins Review’s 100 Best Spiritually Influential People. I accept abstruse that bags of affiliated souls accept apparent agnate mindscapes to those I accept depicted in my paintings. My art and I accept become articular with adapted and college states of consciousness. The Abstracted Art Tribe ceremoniousness me as a airy friend. I am a agent for the acceptable that psychedelics can do. I angle for cerebral alternative and apostle for adroitness as a airy path.

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leunknownlady-blog · 6 years ago

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The Ganzfeld Effect

‘Ganzfeld Effect’ (derived from German ganz = ‘whole, entire’ and feld = ‘field area’) is another method used to alter your state of consciousness. Participants are shun a light whilst wearing a translucent material over their eyes (most commonly split ping-pong balls) and headphones, which usually plays white or pink noise.

The effect is not actually sensory deprivation but labelled as perceptual deprivation, due to the subject’s vision only being impaired.

The participants of the ganzeld report dream-like and complex hallucinations. With the first couple of minutes, the visual field of sight reduces like an indefinite grey cloud and if a red light is shun, the structures or complex patterns are more distinct. Around ten minutes hallucinations start to form, reminiscent to hypnagogic dreams, with some reports of audio hallucinations, such as ringing of bells, voices and melodies. Here are some examples of ganzfeld imagery.

{37 year old woman} ‘‘It was like running a bob sleigh on an uneven runway right down. [There] was snow or maybe water running down. I could hear music, there was music coming from the left side below.’’

{54 year old woman} ‘‘I can see his face, still, it’s very expressive. [I could see] only the horse that comes as if out of clouds. A white horse that jumped over me.’’

The visions are created through the lack of missing stimuli and this have been done for years such as Pythagoras’ cave or polar explorers in white fields of vision. It has also been able to calm and alter brainwave frequencies to alpha/theta

The hallucinations are created through lack of stimuli. By staring at a blank field of one single unchanging colour for a prolonged amount of time, your brain cuts off signals to your eye and the brain begins to fill in the blanks of your own senses. It amplifies what is called 'neural noise', in an attempt to locate missing signals. This noise is perceived as hallucination and causes you to perceive and/or hear stimulus that isn't there. Although rare, this can happen in natural environments e.g. the sun shining through dense clouds can create patterns or complex structures.

A similar phenomena is ‘prisoner’s cinema’, which is reported by prisoner’s who are contained in dark spaces and begin to hallucinate imagery. Pythagoras famously retreated to his cave to receive ideas and wisdom through his visions. And artic explorers, walking through the treacherous snowy conditions, seeing only but white would develop hallucinations too. All of these instances occured due the brain creating information through the lack of stimulus of vision.

Ganzfeld was thought to have evoke hypnagogia, which I like to call ‘the edge of consciousness’, it’s the state that occurs just before falling asleep (hypnopompia is the state of waking up). This is when thoughts start start to skew from reality and progress into more absurdity. Sometimes I wake from hypnagogia before I am able to transition into actual sleep and I reflect upon my thought patterns, completely puzzled by the route my mind meandered, a whole other reality of perception, atmosphere and interaction can pan out.

A common hypnagogia (or hypnopompia) episode is ‘sleep paralysis’, this is when a person is unable to move or speak. The person may also hallucinate, a commonly experience is of a mysterious creature or person lurking in the room but the sleeper is unable to react as they are paralyzed, of course this is all not true and it is just a nightmare.

But in fact the ganzfeld effect is only similar and until fairly recently it was found that does not put subject’s into a hypnagogia state, the hallucinations and thoughts are just very similar. This is because participants are put in the same relaxed mind state, both hypnagogia and the ganzfeld effect reduces the amplitude of frequency to an alpha or theta state.

There is a large empirical database on the correlations between brain functional states (states of consciousness, sleep stages) and EEG characteristics which I previously talked about.

https://www.psychreg.org/brain-ganzfeld-effect/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945208001433

http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/wackermann%20(2008)%20ganzfeld-induced%20hallucinatory%20experience,%20its%20phenomenology%20and%20cerebral%20electrophysiology.pdf

https://neuwritesd.org/2014/03/06/hallucinating-without-drugs-the-profundity-of-silence-and-the-thalamocortical-circuit/

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inphenix · 6 years ago

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djgblogger-blog · 7 years ago

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70 years of instant photos, thanks to inventor Edwin Land's Polaroid camera

http://bit.ly/2rU7Y1w

It's been 70 years of instant photography, thanks to Edwin Land, on the left. AP Photo

It probably happens every minute of the day: A little girl demands to see the photo her parent has just taken of her. Today, thanks to smartphones and other digital cameras, we can see snapshots immediately, whether we want to or not. But in 1944 when 3-year-old Jennifer Land asked to see the family vacation photo that her dad had just taken, the technology didn’t exist. So her dad, Edwin Land, invented it.

The original Polaroid camera freed users from needing to trek to a darkroom to develop their images. Lindsay Moe/Unsplash, CC BY

Three years later, after plenty of scientific development, Land and his Polaroid Corporation realized the miracle of nearly instant imaging. The film exposure and processing hardware are contained within the camera; there’s no muss or fuss for the photographer who just points and shoots and then watches the image materialize on the photo once it spools out of the camera.

Land is probably best known for the “instant photo” – or the spiritual progenitor of today’s ubiquitous selfie. His Polaroid camera was first released commercially in 1948 at retail locations and prices aimed at the postwar middle class. But this is just one of a host of technological breakthroughs Land invented and commercialized, most of which centered around light and how it interacts with materials. The technology used to show a 3D movie and the goggles we wear in the theater were made possible by Land and his colleagues. The camera aboard the U-2 spy plane, as featured in the movie “Bridge of Spies,” was a Land product, as were even some aspects of the plane’s mechanics. He also worked on theoretical problems, drawing on a deep understanding of both chemistry and physics.

I’m a vision scientist who has touched many of the fields in which Land made great advances, through my own work on new imaging methods, image processing techniques and human color vision. As the 2018 recipient of the Edwin H. Land Medal, awarded by the Optical Society of America and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, my own work relies on Land’s technological innovations that made modern imaging possible.

Controlling light’s properties

Edwin Land’s first optics breakthrough came as a young man, when he figured out a convenient and affordable method to control one of the fundamental properties of light: polarization.

You can think of light as waves propagating from a source. Most light sources produce a mixture of waves with all different physical properties, such as wavelength and amplitude of vibration. Light is considered polarized if the amplitude varies in a consistent manner perpendicular to the direction the wave is traveling.

A polarizing filter can block all the light waves that don’t match its orientation. Fouad A. Saad/Shutterstock.com

Given the right material for the light waves to pass through, the light waves may be rotated into another plane, slowed down or blocked. Modern 3D goggles work because one eye receives light waves vibrating along the horizontal plane while the other eye receives the light vibrating along the vertical plane.

Before Land, researchers built components to control polarization from rock crystals, which were assigned almost magical names and properties, though they merely decreased the velocity or amplitude of light waves traveling at specific orientations. Land created “polarizers” by growing small crystals and embedding them in plastic sheets, altering the light passing through depending on its orientation in relation to the rows of crystals. His inexpensive polarizer made it possible to reliably and practically filter light so only wavelengths with a particular orientation would pass through.

Land founded the Polaroid Corporation in 1937 to commercialize his new technology. His sheet polarizers found applications ranging from the identification of chemical compounds to adjustable sunglasses. Polarizing filters became standard in photography to reduce glare. Today the principles of polarized light are used in most computer and cellphone screens, to enhance contrast, decrease glare and even turn on or off individual pixels.

Polarizing filters help researchers visualize structures that might not be seen otherwise – from astronomical features to biological structures. In my own field of vision science, polarization imaging localizes classes of chemicals, such as protein molecules leaking from blood vessels in diseased eyes. Polarization is also combined with high-resolution imaging techniques to detect cellular damage beneath the reflective retinal surface.

A new way to get the data out

Before the days of high-speed digital capture of data and affordable high-resolution displays, or use of videotape, Polaroid photography was the method of choice to obtain output in many scientific labs. Experiments or medical tests needed graphical or pictorial output for interpretation, often from an analog oscilloscope which plotted out a voltage or current change over time. The oscilloscope was fast enough to capture key features of the data – but recording the output for later analysis was a challenge before Land’s instant camera came along.

A common example in vision science is the recording of eye movements. A research study reported in 1960 plotted light reflected from an observer’s moving eye on an oscilloscope screen, which was photographed with a mounted Polaroid camera – not unlike the consumer Polaroid camera a family might pull out at a birthday party. For decades, research labs and medical facilities have used setups consisting of a Polaroid camera and a mounting rig to collect electrical signals displayed on oscilloscope screens. The format sizes are less than dazzling compared to modern digital resolutions, but they were revolutionary at the time.

Land’s inventions led to the widespread use of polarized light to characterize tissues and objects, as in this pseudo-color image of a diabetic patient’s retina that unmasks irregular structures caused by edema. Ann Elsner, CC BY-ND

In 1987, with the founding of my new retinal imaging laboratory, there was no inexpensive method to provide sharable output of our novel images. After a few years of struggling to obtain high-quality output for conferences and publications, the Polaroid Corporation came to our rescue, with the donation of a printer, allowing our scientific contributions to reach an audience beyond our lab.

Eyes are not cameras

Land’s contributions go beyond patenting over 500 innovations and inventing products that millions purchased. His understanding of the interaction of light and matter promoted novel ways of characterizing chemicals with polarized light. And he provided insights into the workings of the human visual system that had seemed to defy the laws of physics, coming up with what he called the Retinex theory of color vision to explain how people perceive a broad range of color without the expected wavelengths being present in the room.

Quick prints can be shared and displayed. Hillary Hartley, CC BY-SA

Despite his brilliance, Land’s Polaroid Corporation eventually hit hard times in the decades after his death in 1991. Heavily invested in its film sales, Polaroid wasn’t prepared as all tiers of the imaging market went digital, with everyone from consumer photographers to high-end medical and optical imagers abandoning film and processing.

But rather than sink with the film market, Polaroid reinvented itself with new products that could help output the new world of digital images. And in a case of history repeating itself, Polaroid and other manufacturers of instant cameras are enjoying renewed popularity with younger generations who had no exposure to the original versions. Just like little Jennifer Land, plenty of people today still want a tangible version of their pictures, right now.

Ann Elsner receives funding from NIDILRR and NIH. She works for Indiana University . She owns shares in Aeon Imaging, LLC.

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swissforextrading · 7 years ago

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Forging a Swiss Lens: 3 Ways Zurich Changed My View of Silicon Valley

Guest contributor Matthew Daiter reflects on life at a Swiss startup — and his return to Silicon Valley. There we were, floating down the Limmatplatz on our makeshift inflatable pizza raft. One by one we peeled off the sides, shooting alpine water at one another while ensuring our raft didn’t pop. Stares accompanied our shrieks while we nearly capsized our boat through a turbine. This would only serve as a minimal precursor for the wasps, sunburn, and my almost-lost passport that accompanied our virgin outing of our “Italian Crusader I”. Our outing was an end to my time living in Zurich, and working in the Swiss tech sphere. Starkly contrasting the rain and stress that had greeted me on my first day in Switzerland, this day felt lighthearted. Drinking beer on a pizza, followed by eating a pizza, and eventually simulating a pizza at Seat 3, Gate 75 in Zurich Airport, all distracted me from my recruiter’s lingering responses to my questions at at my new job in Silicon Valley. “Intense,” my recruiter responded to my question about my new hours. “And with a lot of responsibility. Occasionally people work weekends here.” He added, “We’re composed of small teams. If you pull hard, people will notice; but be warned that if you mess up, people know where to point the finger.” People work weekends? Even during crunch-time at our startup in Switzerland, the office was vacant outside of workdays. “Is there over-time pay for working weekends?” I asked. “No overtime. Vacation days are given out on occasion, but no guarantees.” I couldn’t help but question my own actions pertaining to my return back to the States. On one hand, living in Switzerland felt artificial and forced. My hasty departure from the States landed me in an awkward visa situation, granting me permission to live in Luxembourg and long-term sublet in Switzerland. The spoken language carries a heavily localised dialect, rendering it difficult to pick up without costly courses. My nationality hampered my ability to obtain medical treatment or open a bank account in Zu?rich. But on the other hand, living in Zurich forced completely unanticipated personal growth. Weekends once filled with work and JIRA tickets were now occupied with impulsive SCUBA trips off the Italian coast, ibex-spotting excursions in southeast Switzerland, and under-the-bridge “nature raves” a quick train-ride away from Zu?rich proper. Being able to remove myself from the constant specter of work made me more creative and driven; in fact, this replenished focus led to developing the research that landed me and my co-publishers a spot at the European Conference of Computer Vision in 2016. Zurich, with its initially cold and unwelcoming air, proved to be filled with incredibly inviting and skilled individuals that force-fed life into our startup, leading to meetings with Paramount and BMW. Tucked away in the Swiss Alps happened to be a large village of congregated intellectuals pushing the frills of science without the warping magnet of fiscal motivation eroding personal development. Would returning to the States — with weekends working, long commutes, and a culture of outworking others as a sense of social validation — be worth the effort? The Return Returning felt almost foreign. My smile dropped when I left my apartment for my first commute to my job in Sunnyvale. In front of me, a homeless man pleaded for help to cross the street. Bodies rushed past him, urgent to catch fleeting express trains to their six-figure jobs in South Bay. Tripping over the impoverished to make thousands per week symbolized one of many culture shocks on my return to the States: polarization seeps into the foundation propping up San Francisco. This is the system I support? My first train ride would commence my stark re-entry to American Reality. For five days a week, a three-hour roundtrip commute and a ten-hour workday would become standard. Money replaced personal time: from DoorDash’ed desk dinners to Ubers for when public transport closed, money became an excuse for the sacrilege of sleep and after-work personal space. While I hammered away at code for 12 hours a day, my far-sight eye muscles relaxed and my long-term vision diluted to a two-week gaze. My (multi-thousand kilometer) leap of faith revealed far more about Silicon Valley than I could have imagined. There’s a lot of emerging discussion around Hacker News and the Bay Area that spawned from various domestic American events about immigrating to another country to pursue founding a startup. Switzerland tectonically shifted my view of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, debased American Reality for me, and redefined my idea of success. Invariably the right move for me at the time, I hope this article sheds light on the process of immigration and starting-up abroad. Here are three ways my “Swiss lens” changed my vision of Silicon Valley. 1. Less choice leads to more concentration Routine seeps into Swiss culture. Trash must be disposed within certain types of bags. Trains must depart on time. Assigned laundry days are commonplace. The streets are cleanly swept and washed down daily. Like clockwork, Switzerland moves to an implicit schedule expressed throughout the perceivable culture. Tuning out the outside world proved to be one of the main advantages of Zu?rich. The lack of decision-making prodding for attention let our research team more whole-heartedly focus on the tasks at hand. My laundry would be done on Friday night at 6. The 33 bus for home always came to the office at 11:35 (I’m a late sleeper) and left at 00:06. My groceries rarely became unavailable or varied in price, making it easy to budget out monthly costs. All of this culminated in an easy commute to the office, focus on work, and leave without fretting about fiscal or scheduling issues. When returning to the Bay Area, grocery shopping was one of many trivialities that caught me off-guard. Twenty variations of yogurt lined the grocery shelves, each with different price points and niches. At the top were premium and exclusive foreign yogurts. Scanning further down the aisle came variations in yogurt sale points. “No sugar added”. “Icelandic rations”. “Cashew-milk-made”. Overwhelmed by options, I found myself choosing products not due to a rationale on the product itself, but on the advertised price point and deals that accompanied it. As the only common variable between so many dimensions of a product I thought I had known, this was my fallback mechanism. This was just for yogurt. Noise — visual, auditory, cultural — can empower or dampen the focus and amplitude of executing your idea. Growing up in America normalized one extreme of this; Switzerland, the other. San Francisco is filled with all degrees of opportunity; you need to find your place and hone in on what you want. Switzerland can be quiet enough to hear a cigarette crackle at night. You need to construct what you want. While having less choice was initially off-putting, it allowed me to tune out parts of my life that I found didn’t matter, leading to a more efficient work process and faster results. 2. Strong public investment can outperform the private sector in creating better individual experiences. I had always assumed that private companies simply outperformed Bay Area public services because of market pressure and their higher cost. Owning a car or using a ride-share app would get you to a destination faster and more comfortably than using public transport; private schools typically delivered better educational results than the public system (unless you lived in a wealthy school district); and private healthcare was so expensive because its quality was incredible compared to public clinics. Data existed to reinforce this: the MUNI in San Francisco has an on-time rate of 57%. The New York Times published extensive data correlating wealth and educational development; and for the hefty price of Cigna or Kaiser, San Francisco hospitals mostly outrank other national offerings. Switzerland blew my logic out of the water. Transportation In 2013, 87.5% of passengers reached their destination within three minutes of the advertised time within Switzerland. Compare this to the MUNI in San Francisco, which has an on-time percentage rate of 57%. The MUNI’s lack of predictability contributes to the creation of fallbacks onto private infrastructure filling the vacuum for an in-efficient public transportation system in San Francisco, such as ride sharing services like Uber or Lyft. These makeshift props for those that can bear the cost cause the general public to lose out and fluctuations in budgeting transportation for the month, leading to more induced stress and worse predictability. Whether visiting Luxembourg from Switzerland, going on a weekend beach vacation to Italy, or bumming off to the Swiss wilderness, the expansive and well- maintained public transportation system makes daisy-chaining transport links easy and predictable. 1.5 hours of train, bus and cable-car travel can get you to the side of an alp in Amden or a lake in Lucerne. And for this reason, co-workers and I hiked on the weekend and explored Switzerland and surrounding countries. Getting to Yosemite National Park from San Francisco takes around 3.5 hours by car, and even more time by multiple non-coordinated legs of public transportation. Education ETH Zurich and EPFL (Switzerland’s flagship technical universities and two of the top engineering schools in the world) provided top-notch education for all Swiss high-school graduates at an affordable price-point of 580 CHF a semester. Comparable schools in the Bay Area (Stanford and UC Berkeley) offer tuition for $16,329 a semester and $13,900 a semester, respectively, and only admit a select few. Not only did these easily accessible, meritocratic Swiss universities produce a wealth of qualified and ambitious young scientists and engineers, but having ETH Zu?rich twenty minutes away created a backdoor into one of the most qualified talent pools in continental Europe for scaling our startup. Recruiting events like Startup Speed Dating flooded our resume bank with highly capable applicants. With Switzerland’s popular percentage-based work system, these students could easily split work and research, and we could directly profit off of this talent pool. Furthermore, ETH’s free public schooling system for auditors meant that a world-caliber education was only a short bus ride away. In an industry where uncommon educational trajectories are normalized, the Swiss educational system encourages continual educational development without the particular commitment of obtaining a diploma. When performing 3D-reconstruction research, sitting in on classes and hammering top-notch professors with our questions allowed us to move faster throughout our development cycles. Healthcare Finally, healthcare was not only cheap, but also of incredible quality. Under the Swiss system, having healthcare is mandatory; however, average healthcare in Switzerland costs only 200-400CHF ($201-$402) a month. With this, all basic services are provided at a fixed, up-front cost under national law. No insurance company can profit off of these basic services. For an average-salaried Swiss worker ($60,124 in 2016), self-financing healthcare is approachable. When I woke up one morning with an illness, I immediately rushed off to ETH’s hospital for treatment. While I was turned down due to my nationality and lack of Swiss-specific living permit, I was able to obtain treatment at the free clinic within the train station. Although needing to pay out-of-pocket for treatment, Luxembourgish health care covered all of my costs from the social system through expedited invoices. Over the coming months, the clinic urged me to return for checkups (completely covered by social services) while taking high-grade and fast-acting pharmaceuticals (also completely covered by social services) to ensure a full recovery. Normally, clinics in the Bay Area are for the uninsured, with an attached stigma of lesser quality and optionality. Clinics in Switzerland allowed for quick and easy high-quality recuperation. Heavy public investments created reliable, maintainable, and quality services. Zu?rich proved that a system optimised to the needs of the public instead of the individual can offer alternate avenues to provide a better experience that services everyone’s needs. 3. Adjustable work schedules boosted employee retention and easier recruitment of dynamic labor pools In Switzerland, employees can usually decide the percentage of a week they’d like to work in return for the corresponding percentage of a complete full-time salary. Having this concept integrated as a societal norm mitigated outside factors causing burnout and stress. When I became hospitalized, not only were my medical bills completely taken care of, but my teammates emphasized that my return would be on my own schedule with my own ramp-up period. This became integral when returning to my role at Nomoko. In America, employers often limit sick days and can fire employees who can’t promptly return. American companies aren’t required by federal law to provide paid sick days to employees, leaving more than a third of Americans with absolutely no sick days. When we needed to let go of my co-worker, she was legally entitled to receive 70% of her previous compensation for 6 months. Switzerland has an incredible unemployment system: if you ever become unemployed, the Swiss government will provide 70-80% of your prior compensation for up to 18 months. While this may seem overly generous, this doesn’t actually affect the unemployment rate significantly; in fact, Switzerland has the same unemployment rate compared to the United States. A massive societal safety net helped employees feel enabled to take a risk working for our startup. Finally, vacation time is plentiful and without stigma. My American work- weekends were replaced with email-free Alp hikes. When I decided to take my (legal-minimum) four-week holiday on short notice, my boss encouraged me to go to avoid burnout. When I told my coworkers in Silicon Valley that I was going on a two-week vacation to Morocco, one team member shot back “we might not be able to find you, but email can!” American law doesn’t enforce employers to give vacation time off. 43% of Americans working at small businesses cited heavy workloads as a primary barrier to taking time off. While many tech startups in the Bay offer unlimited vacation as a perk, this can quickly be manipulated to ensure no large payouts become necessary for when employees leave, while disabling employees from going on vacation at all. Stigmatizing vacation doesn’t lead to more work getting done; it leads to disgruntled employees, output deceleration, and high workforce throughput. Constant work-sprints in America led to slower results and resentment against my employer. Being able to pause led to higher spikes in creativity and further concentration within the workplace. A Swiss Mindset When leaving for Switzerland, packing my life into a suitcase proved to be surprisingly easy. Irreplaceability trumped all else: I tucked away my typography books and electronics into my check-in bag, along with just a single hoodie for the approaching winter. A quick leaf over my valuables—passport, birth certificate with apostille, flight information—and then I departed. Unpacking my life back in America has been difficult. Caught between multiple cultures, the culmination of working in Switzerland showed me first-hand that cultures tackle and optimise for various social and economic facets and that this active research on what the collective human effort can provide for its citizens benefits humanity as a whole. While I missed the Bay Area for its undying friendliness and creativity, some of its blemishes have become apparent only from gaining distance. Even while undergoing my reintegration to America, my mind still lingers in Switzerland. Shameless plug: if you’re currently looking to make an actual virtual reality Swiss camera (lens included), Nomoko is currently hiring for software, electrical and mechanical engineering positions. They helped change my lens of reality; maybe they’ll help change yours too. --- Photo of Amden, courtesy of Matt Daiter: “My favorite place to hike.” https://nextrends.swissnexsanfrancisco.org/forging-a-swiss-lens-3-ways-zurich-changed-my-view-of-silicon-valley/ (Source of the original content)

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fluidsf · 4 years ago

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Polar Visions Amplitude reviewing -

John Wiese - Deviate From Balance

Released on 15 June 2015 by Gilgongo Records

Reviewed format: CD album

Connected listening - there are various ways to order a selection of John Wiese’s further discography. The Helicopter mail-order stocks various John Wiese releases as well as Sissy Spacek releases and releases by by John Wiese in collaboration with associates, you can find it here: https://helicopter.storenvy.com/collections/924921-john-wiese

Several solo releases by John Wiese are also available on physical and digital format from his Bandcamp page here: https://johnwiese.bandcamp.com

Many releases on Gilgongo Records are available on physical format through their mail-order store here: https://gilgongorecords.storenvy.com

After looking at one of Sissy Spacek’s recent new albums Featureless Thermal Equilibrium in the previous Polar Visions Amplitude it’s time today for the first of two follow-up reviews in which in this case we’re focussing first on one of John Wiese’s past solo albums, Deviate From Balance. Released back in 2015 on both a 2 LP vinyl package as well as a CD version on James Fella’s label Gilgongo Records our look is on the CD version which features the packed 79 minute album in full and what a collection of pieces it is. While the Sissy Spacek album showcases John Wiese’s talent in mixing Grindcore aggression with monolithic Noise screeches as well as maxing out the energy throughout, Deviate From Balance showcases John’s more restrained side in a collection of 10 tracks encompassing mostly live recorded compositions and improvisations that are leaning more towards intense choppy sound collages and noisy electro-acoustic interplay of acoustic and electric instrumentation with John’s electronics with a more conceptual edge to them. However while some of the titles of the 10 pieces suggest a somewhat philosophical or technical meaning behind these pieces, listening to these reveals a much more playful and raw sense of composition and performances from John and all musicians and artists involved in this album. Whilst John’s sound can be related to Free Improvisation, his rapid-fire editing and manipulation of sonic material on this album is much more complex and dazzling than many other artists and carries John’s signature knack for surprise, high frequency distortion crunches as well as shifting and abusing lo-fi sound recording equipment and electronics in as many ways as possible, almost as if they turn into crumbling fragile rocks. Disintegrating broken sound and dadaist absurdist humour is a recurring theme in John’s sound, making for an album that is much more enjoyable than overly academic contemporary Tape Music can be at times. Besides John’s sonics the involved musicians on this album are definitely an important element that adds many rich colours to the 10 pieces, featuring musicians like guitar virtuoso Oren Ambarchi, violin artist Jon Rose, sampling expert David Shea and drum machine musician Ikue Mori as well as many others. Before we’re diving deep into the 10 tracks on Deviate From Balance, let’s have a look at the packaging design of the CD version. The CD comes in a neat glossy oversized gatefold sleeve showcasing John Wiese’s minimalist design, artwork as well as a very colourful artist photo of John by Martin Escalante on the back. In terms of artwork I do like the photo-collages and art pieces on the inside of the gatefold a bit more than the cover this time as while the cover does highlight the general collaged, choppy nature of the album well in a visual manner, its subdued grayscale grainy images aren’t as striking as John Wiese’s other album covers but still, it’s a decent cover and the typography is quite stylish and repeats on the spine in a similar manner. The aforementioned imagery on the inside of the gatefold showcases both grayscale abstract art in the form of archaeological artefact style fragments on the left panel as well as a film roll like photo collage of a rather disturbed looking lady blowing up a balloon. The abstract images are a bit similar to the album cover though with darker and more distinct contrast but the photo collage also adds another good visual reference to the packaging regarding the tracks themselves in that balloon like squealing and screeching can be heard on some of the pieces and it also seems to refer to the album’s quite off the wall type of abstract humour. The left panel additionally features all album credits neatly laid out so you can find out all about the involved artists and recording locations plus sources. The CD itself comes in a convenient little black envelope with plastic protection and features a more LP like label design featuring simply the artist name, album title and Gilgongo label logo, somewhat similar to a Japanese mini-LP replica package. Now that we’ve looked at the package, let’s pop in the CD and dig in.

Deviate From Balance starts with Wind Changed Direction which is one of the most atmospheric pieces on the album. The piece blends organ like drone, chopped up distorted recordings of what sounds like children’s voices, machinery as well as other Industrial noises together to form a quite surreal mysterious soundscape. Quite like the title suggests the music sounds quite like you’re floating through the clouds right after the wind has changed direction. The drone feels both calming but also a notch ominous whilst the auto-panned chops of sound are both vaguely abstract and at times recognisable with John varying between distorted and resonant shards of crunchy sound and cleaner metallic elements. The voice samples hint somewhat at sonified memories, they sound like fragments from the past, conversations or event you might remember from childhood though the actual words are unrecognizable. This first piece is definitely one of the most straight-forward compositions on here in terms of structure with the drone both introducing and rounding off the piece as in both cases it eventually fades into the background. A quite lush start of the album. Following piece 356 S. Mission Rd continues the soundscape like approach but in a more ominous manner sounding quite like a cross of dark sounding orchestral music samples with strange hollow metallic resonances and washy shifting noises. The metallic resonances bring plenty of subdued Industrial shine to the piece but the aforementioned orchestral samples are what draws me into this piece the most as the screechy dissonant strings combined with ever so slightly differently timed horn crescendo suggest an ever apparent danger which is getting closer but just like in an abstract nightmare is stuck in a loop with the danger never reaching further than a certain indiscernible point. The shifting noise elements add some rawness to the piece which suggests some kind of turntable manipulations going on in the piece, a lovely brooding collage piece this is. Segmenting Process For Language, the next piece, is where things start to get more chaotic and free-wheeling though still very much controlled. The track featuring a live performance recorded at East Brunswick Club in Melbourne, Australia consists of wild and inspired mixtures of saxophone, (junk) objects, percussion, drums, guitar and noise as the musicians move into always differing “segments” made up of shards of sound, wildly swirling melodies, chords and tones. This does make for quite some literal clashes of sound but rather than being one of the more random sounding Free Improv performances the sections of interplay follow a much more recognisable structure in that certain droning tones as well as feedback lays somewhat of a base underneath the bursts of sonic mayhem. Whilst there are a whole lot of things happening in this recording I would like to name a few particularly enjoyable bits. These include the short bursts of squelchy synth swirls, resonant ground vibrating feedback laden noise, the hilarious goofy but still playful wordless vocalisations spat out by the musicians but also the at times disturbing dissonant chords which are formed and culminate in an absurdly, almost 50’s Horror film soundtrack like waves of organ droning at the ending of the piece after which we can hear the only applause that could be fit in on the tightly edited CD. An inventive juxtaposition of out of the blue musical absurdism with the more dadaist lightning strike like approach of collage based Harsh Noise carrying John’s seal of quality. The next track Superstitious does match its title rather well in terms of the sounds within and it’s the most Noise focussed piece on Deviate From Balance though still more along the lines of a layered soundscape. After the instrumental interplay of Segmenting Process For Language we’re back to a more noticeably composed piece which moves through various phases emitting a definite ambience of superstition through somewhat disturbing concrete sounds, noise and tones. Its beginning featuring chopped and quite heavily scrambled recordings of a scared woman wailing as well as various other waves of distorted sound and tone overtime moves to the climax of the piece which is an extended section of the aforementioned noise from by a nicely low end grounded stream of screechy sound featuring especially piercing high frequency sound manipulations quite like some kind of dystopian alien machinery, though your interpretation might definitely be much different. Regardless of how you interpret it, the piercing noise does give off quite an intense feeling of dread and fear and while the sounds used in the piece are sometimes somewhat recognisable, like dirt like crumbling sounds, coffee cups, car related sounds etc., again they’re manipulated and structured in such shifting and distorted manners that they feel like sudden waves of mind imagery than things you can really grab onto. The finale of the piece in which John frequency manipulates a continuous tone is quite gripping too and Superstitious as a whole sounds quite like both a physical and mind gripping piece. Cafe OTO is the track that follows and it’s obviously a live recording that was made at Cafe OTO. Moving back to the more improvisation based style of collaborative group performances that John Wiese has done together with other musicians this piece has a more continuous flow of sonic events and instrumental interplay and a generally might lighter edge to it than some of the other pieces. Especially the percussion blended with effect manipulations and saxophone performances are particularly good on here with percussion clattering, clinking, jumping around the room in quite hilarious surprising manners moving from crystal like tinkling to shells and wooden percussion whilst the saxes wildly swirling melody lines and screeches form sweet tonal abstraction that are wild but not going overboard and staying well in tune with the other elements of the performances. The “spat” out vocalisations are quite matching with the saxophone performance and whilst somewhat more subtle for most of the recording, there’s also some tasty, albeit less abrasive crashes of objects near the end of the recording. Again, John Wiese’s talent in highly abstract but always varied and uncompromising electronics and instrumental performances combined with the excellent inspired energy of all musicians that appears in his group performances shines through with the fun and details in the layers created making this suitable for many repeat listens. The following track Battery Instruments (Stereo) does work quite like an extension of the sounds from the Cafe OTO recording, though in a bit more minimalistic fashion being made up of mostly small, clicky and quite sounds. A collage of instrument, objects, electronics as well as short vocal bursts the piece puts the freely moving aspect of John Wiese’s group pieces into more of microscopic lowercase territory. It’s the shortest piece of the album at 2:12 minutes and works as kind of transition from Cafe OTO to the quite abrasive walkman Noise collage piece Memaloose Walkman, showcasing various crackling, scraping, spiky sonic details, a mysterious subdued drone as well as some quite tasteful bass string scratchings all panned quite widely (as this was originally a multi-channel piece). A sweet short piece this one. The aforementioned piece Memaloose Walkman then follows and it’s quite straight-forward in nature consisting of a mono tape collage of various recordings of gunshots. Besides splices and perhaps a bit of pitch adjustment there’s not much manipulation added to this but as a Noise piece it’s quite effective letting you hear the different swishing phased textures of shots from various guns as well as some bits of talk and music in between with a layer of crunchy saturation on top of everything. Simple but effective. Afterwards Dramatic Accessories continues within the Noise territory as a piece of quite a lot of instrument / object and especially turntable abuse featuring quite a lot of bassy and wild distorted screeches mixed with chopped recordings all presented through some crazy panning. One that will especially please harsh heads, within Dramatic Accessories there are various sections in which John and the other artists involved use all kinds of methods to create a variety of sounds ranging from the shifting kind of turntable warble, clicks, grating washes of distortion, chunks of feedback, amp hiss and metallic ringing. However whilst there are a lot of distorted sonic events happening within this piece, there is some sense of dynamics within however, created by the wild panning as well as shifting the phase and using some of the room acoustics and feedback of equipment to create some loud / softer / loud sections leaving some headroom for the sounds to not fully max out and become a bit overblown. The garbled object and instrument chops are clattering around often but strange distorted disturbing recordings of voices are also thrown in the mix making for an at times frightening but thrilling ride of unpredictable sounds. One element that is recurring throughout the wildly fluttering barrages of different sounds are certain grounded tones that bring forth some kind go base for all sounds to lean on as they continue changing in at times rapid manners. All in all Dramatic Accessories is another enjoyable sonic ride on Deviate From Balance in which rich and uncompromising textures are brought out in memorable ways through some fine inspired performances from all people involved. Solitaire follows, which is one of the two longest and final pieces on Deviate From Balance, at 11:15 minutes. In terms of approach the piece is somewhat similar to Dramatic Accessories but with the difference that rather than using vinyl, tape is being used here as one of the elements that create the various sounds within the piece. Solitaire follows a more continuous structure than other pieces on Deviate From Balance in that it’s mostly based on a set of repeating patterns within it's structure acting a bit like the compositional and performance equivalent of mechanical processes. Whereas Dramatic Accessories featured experiments with both clean and distorted sounds, Solitaire moves more into a quite crunchy rough direction featuring shards of chopped up instrument and music recordings, junk objects, voices as well a various especially percussive and resonant concrete sounds that ever continue to change in form. These repetitive patterns do give some kind of rhythmic drive to the piece but change often enough to not become sampler like and are more akin warbled broken tapes as the recordings are mercilessly abused through speed manipulations and ever increasing distortion. This is combined with a constant shift of stereo phase, through which on headphones you get the idea that the shards of sound are flying over your head and are forming 3D shapes in between your ears. A great listening experience which even works as the distortion gets quite murky and harsh nearing the end of the piece. Whilst the pattern style, on the fly pitch warbles and crunching noises carries on throughout, it’s great how some depth is slowly forming near the end of the piece, in which soft ticking percussive bits are being scattered between out ears and rimshot like ticking sounds are added for nice clean percussive accents. A very fluid piece in terms of progression and sound work which shows that whilst John Wiese’s solo and band works might at times sound very free-flowing and chaotic, he’s always got quite some noticeable control and focus within every piece, inspired and always different. Final piece Segmenting Process (Oregon) is indeed somewhat related to the earlier Segmenting Process For Language although in the case of this recording the segmenting of the several parts of the piece is even more clear. Being the longest piece on Deviate From Balance at 21:45 minutes the piece is also one of the most introspective and “organized” sounding tracks on the album as in here we can find the by now familiar mixture of acoustic, electric instrumentation with both electronic sounds and manipulations but also a more restrained approach to the Noise elements John Wiese has explored in various ways in most tracks before this one. Rather than almost overtaking the non-electronic instrumentation either through loudness or sharp (harsh) frequencies, the Noise is more in tune with the instrumentation as being a part of a blend of various sonic elements. This is also helped by the fact that with the larger group setting featuring brass, percussions, drums and more the piece required a larger venue to be performed which gives the piece some welcome acoustic space, adding some room ambience and keeps the piece nicely dynamic. Sounding most similar in approach to Electroacoustic Improvisation the pieces segments blending vibrant instrumental performances which vary from fluttering percussive tones, noises as well as more drone focussed falling and rising tones with crackling, noisy, humming, distorted, sample based and glitchy electronics sound quite like the piece is based on a mixture of dreams. Like a sonic interpretation of a dream world the piece moves from segment to segment with all of them featuring somewhat recognisable sounds like the instruments themselves or voices mixed with shaped abstract noises but everything carries some kind of mystery within it, which is especially caused by the somewhat unnerving textures created by the brass instruments within the performance. The absurdist humour element is still apparent within the piece however with at times goofy squeaky noises, drum kit hits, tinkling bells and other pointy bits of abstract sound keeping things nicely playful and light but still powerful as always. The flow of the piece also helps to keep things captivating and interesting throughout as its length might take some listeners a bit to get into it but with so many different events happening throughout there’s never any idleness in here. And with this last piece I’m getting into the conclusion of this review of John Wiese’s Deviate From Balance. I award this album a Polar Visions Amplitude of 85 dB, recommending you to definitely check out this album. Deviate From Balance showcases both John Wiese’s compositional and performance talents through a varied selection of recordings in which you can hear John’s approach in various settings ranging from surreal sound collages, Noise infused instrumental improvisations to rough tape manipulation and Electroacoustic Improvisation. Never resorting to mere academic musical studies John Wiese’s pieces on Deviate From Balance keep hitting the ears and mind in excellent and inspiring manners and will be a great discovery for fans of free spirited contemporary music, both analog and digital based sound collage works, (Harsh) Noise fans as well as anyone into inspired improvised music and will be a great addition to the collection of fans of John Wiese and Sissy Spacek.

Deviate From Balance is available on CD from Gligongo Records mail-order store here: https://gilgongorecords.storenvy.com/products/20648396-john-wiese-deviate-from-balance-cd-gggr-077

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fluidsf · 4 years ago

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Polar Visions Amplitude reviewing -

Sissy Spacek - Featureless Thermal Equilibrium

Released on September 4, 2020 by Helicopter

Reviewed format: CD album

Connected listening - there are various ways to order a selection of Sissy Spacek’s further discography. The Helicopter mail-order stocks various Sissy Spacek releases and solo works by John Wiese and associates, you can find it here: https://helicopter.storenvy.com/collections/924915-sissy-spacek

Sissy Spacek’s releases on both physical and digital format are also available from their Bandcamp page here: https://sissyspacek.bandcamp.com/music

For an overview of Charlie Mumma’s solo releases as well as the releases he’s featured on as part of various bands, you can check out Discogs here: https://www.discogs.com/artist/1491175-Charlie-Mumma

In a similar manner, Jay Randall’s solo and band releases can be found on Discogs here: https://www.discogs.com/artist/393304-Jay-Randall

Several solo releases by John Wiese are available on physical and digital format from his Bandcamp page here: https://johnwiese.bandcamp.com

As I mentioned in the previous Polar Visions Amplitude review on this blog, 2020 has proven to be quite a fruitful year for both new Noise releases as well as reissues of classic Harsh Noise albums, mentioning the recent Helicopter / Troniks batch of CD releases and today we’re going to start diving into these with a review of one of the most recent Sissy Spacek albums, Featureless Thermal Equilibrium. Sissy Spacek is a John Wiese formed band which as being one of his most well-known projects not only carries a very prolific discography of a big number of albums, EPs, singles and many miscellaneous releases but is also an ever-changing line-up of extreme music artists and performers from various directions of experimental and contemporary music. This makes Sissy Spacek a rather versatile band with the kind of music / Noise you’re going to get on every release being quite unpredictable at times as this could vary from monolithic Harsh Noise to gritty Noise filled Grindcore to free-wheeling electro-acoustic cut-ups of instrumental and vocal recordings created by John Wiese. On Featureless Thermal Equilibrium we get to listen to Sissy Spacek as a raw power filled anarchist Grindcore unit which is continually blasted through with screechy Noise courtesy of John. Sissy Spacek’s core of John Wiese’s streams of Noise (and vocals in this case too) and Charlie Mumma’s fiery thunderous drums and vocals is strengthened here with Jay Randall (of Agoraphobic Nosebleed and various other terror-filled extreme Grindcore and Harsh Noise themed projects) providing particularly aggressive and appropriately screechy screamed vocals to the general energy-filled chaos that is this 24-minute new album. The album is one hell of a ride of dissonant murky noisy sonic energy that blends John Wiese’s screechy layers of Noise with surprisingly crisp sounding vocals and drums which in the case of this album still have quite a dynamic and roomy sound to them, creating some kind of balance in what in other cases could end up being more of a wall of Noise with all elements blending into eachother. Before we dive into this speedy album, it’s good to mention the neat looking presentation of Featureless Thermal Equilibrium, designed by John Wiese. The CD version of the album comes in a sturdy thick 6 panel digipak featuring some great minimalist artwork. The cover artwork is quite striking with its eerie grainy image of a face (which looks familiar but I can’t quite place where I saw it before) with the name of the band and album title set in some quite classy looking serif type. It has quite the classic LP sleeve look to it which purely based on the cover could suggest that the music contained within would be more like Hard Rock or Metal but its grittiness does express the actual music rather well. Other than the cover artwork the imagery on the digipak and CD face feature mostly grainy undefined composed textures that do very well carry that visualised Noise look that best expresses the crumbling shapes of texture that Noise can often conjure up in your mind when you dive into it and start to notice its many subtle variations. John Wiese’s signature type-writer style typography is looking great on the album’s digipak as always with the spine featuring the more recognisable all-caps Sissy Spacek “logo” with wide spacing and while the extra dirt John applies to the letters to make them look more degraded (again matching the music) can make some text a bit harder to read, especially in the credits listed on the back of the digipak, the design looks excellent and adds to the experience of the album’s raw power in visual form. Besides the artwork itself looking great, I also want to point out that the artwork is also printed in very cool looking silvery metallic ink making all art reflect and shine in a subtle manner, giving it some premium edge and the attention to detail that I appreciate a lot in the design of music releases even when it’s extreme music which often carries a much rougher, dirtier and at times lo-fi edge to it which might make it seems like premium artwork isn’t fitting its aesthetic that much. Now that we’ve looked over the presentation of Featureless Thermal Equilibrium, let’s dig into the album itself.

Just like what I found to be often the case with Grindcore or Grindcore related albums, Featureless Thermal Equilibrium is best to be listened in one go as being one long track as the 13 listed tracks are actually split up into at least 40 separate tracks especially about half-way into the album. It’s pretty much blast after blast after blast of raw and particularly rough power rooted in almost absolute dissonant chaos that with its relentless energy over so many blasts becomes an exhaustive but especially thrilling 24 minute ride that keeps the group on point throughout and proved to me that length doesn’t matter that much with this kind of album as it’s better not to let the band burn out after its first half but keeps things as consistent as Sissy Spacek are here. Amusingly the track titles (Fffff Eeeee, Aaaaa Ttttt, Uuu Rrr Eee) directly seem to reference the choppy nature of the blasts as well as spell out the album title, pointing out how Sissy Spacek themselves also point out that the album is like a continuous 24 minute recording rather than a collection of tracks recorded over several weeks or months (this is also confirmed on the back of the digipak as this album was recorded in a single day). Whilst this album is really best enjoyed by rocking out wildly to the energy blasts the band provides to let it all out, listening to this album on headphones does reveal some nice shifts in the separate layers that make up the bands sound on this album. Let’s start with the Grindcore layers of vocals and drums. The vocals are made up of these murky groaning lava like rumbling screeches with the “lead vocal” (most likely Jay Randall) driving the tracks themselves with rough gravel like screechy grumbling in words that are mostly quite indiscernible though you could guess mostly along the lines of “you motherfuckers” and related aggressive words thrown at us, as I heard. The lead vocals vary in intensity throughout with the shorter blasts being moments when the grumble layers take over at times with the lead vocals quickly returning with further bursts of grit but what I generally noticed from the album as a whole is that they form a bit of a circular pattern, starting off intense, falling a bit in intensity in the middle until rising again the most right at the end of the final track, Equilibrium as being a final screechy Harsh Noise finale to burn up the last remaining drops of fuel into a sparkling explosion. The drums in the pieces are somewhat between rumbling bass layer and an almost Free Improvisation like acoustic edge to the tracks, varying from blast-beats to many different often cymbal filled fills. The first few tracks showcase Charlie Mumma’s tumbling but tight drum performances with some surprisingly clean sounding tom tom and aforementioned hi-hat fills that also literally fill in most of the stereo field within the mostly centred noise and vocals that have a rougher more mono sound to them. The short blasts obviously mostly feature very fast blast-beats but after the lengthy sections of short blasts Charlie returns to the more free-flowing mixture of slower blast-beats and drum fills at the end of the album, but definitely blasting away at the finale of the last track however. The noise layer within the pieces never changes that dramatically, being quite like a gritty hazy mass of extra lava that drives the sonic mayhem forward however it’s noticeable that it does shift from screechy, mid / high frequency focussed sharp lines of Noise to lower rumbling streams during the short blasts until reaching a critical state at the finale of the last track. Interesting to notice is how most of the time the sources of the Noise are pretty hard to discern but within the first few tracks a few notes and even bass tones can still be heard throughout the continuous streaming screeching, giving away how the Noise within is created on this album. In the end I can say that Featureless Thermal Equilibrium showcases Sissy Spacek’s strengths especially in its focussed thunderous dissonant energy and excellent interplay between the performers but also does offer some rewarding subtle variations within the screeching streams of manic gritty sound which make for an enjoyable listen on the performance level too. This is another entry within the ever-growing Sissy Spacek discography of ever-inspired sonic freedom and anarchy, a recommended listen for fans of Grindcore, Noise and Sissy Spacek’s other (noisy) albums and with awarding this album a Polar Visions Amplitude of 90 dB I do recommend this album very strongly.

Featureless Thermal Equilibrium is available on CD and as a download from the Helicopter Bandcamp page here: https://helicopter.bandcamp.com/album/featureless-thermal-equilibrium

#polar visions amplitude #sissy spacek #Featureless Thermal Equilibrium #september 4 #2020 #helicopter #cd album #album review #charlie mumma #jay randall #john wiese #grindcore #noise #aggressive #fiery #anarchic #pva

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fluidsf · 4 years ago

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Polar Visions Amplitude / Fluid Sonic Fluctuations - Cross reviewing:

Gamardah Fungus - 10 Years Compilation: Singles, Rarities, Remixes

Self-released on September 9, 2020 by Gamardah Fungus

Reviewed format: review copy of the Gamardah Fungus self-released compilation as lossless WAV files in master-quality resolutions up to 32-bit/44.1kHz. Many thanks to Igor Yalivec for sending this over.

Selected connected listening: More music by Gamardah Fungus in the form of albums and compilation tracks is available on physical format and as downloads from their Bandcamp page (https://gamardahfungus.bandcamp.com)

The Metempsychosis compilation as well as other dark experimental Ukrainian underground music is available from Khatacomb (https://khatacomb.bandcamp.com)

Most Monocube albums are available on physical and digital format from this Bandcamp page (https://monocube.bandcamp.com)

Gamardah Fungus is a name that you might’ve come across earlier on through this blog if you’ve been following this blog for a longer time and indeed I have reviewed a track of theirs earlier as featured on the excellent Kaleidoscope compilation released on Flaming Pines last year. After the release of their excellent new album Natural Storm on Hidden Vibes at the end of that same year, the Ukrainian duo consisting of experimental musician and sound artist Igor Yalivec and guitarist Sergey Yagoda recently returned with a new self-release on CD celebrating the 10 year anniversary of this project. Titled 10 Years Compilation: Singles, Rarities, Remixes, the CD includes a selection of compilation appearances as well as remixes of 3 Gamardah Fungus tracks by associated Breakcore and Drill & Bass infused Drum & Bass project Submatukana (which features Igor Yalivec). Gamardah Fungus combines Drone Doom inspired guitar performances by Sergey with Igor’s rich electronic and electro-acoustic layers forming a kind of Ambient that blends at times lush calm atmospheres with the darkness of Metal, hazy distortion and elements of Noise, field recordings as well as looped drum recordings into their signature style. It’s because of this interesting mixture of Ambient with darker underground music influences that I’ve tagged this review under both Polar Visions Amplitude and Fluid Sonic Fluctuations as the music encompasses various crossing approaches to sound and melody. This variation is also apparent in the quite diverse approach you’ll hear on this compilation, differing from track to track whilst still retaining the melancholic, somewhat hopeless but also calming feelings Gamardah Fungus’ music radiates, with the three remixes being more consistent and similar in approach. The CD obviously enables you to check out Dmitry Khabarov’s excellent cover artwork printed on a nice cardboard sleeve but also in the digital format of my review copy (similar to the download version) it looks great. The tribal like ritual style from the etch like black and white image makes me think of imagery depicting ancient gods and various animals sacrificed to theses gods in auspicious times above the fire. It’s got a lovely non-symmetrical style to it with creatures, flowers, elegant decorations flowing around the square making this a lovely “classic” kind of artwork that does match the more organic elements of the music on the album, especially those featuring nature recordings. Further into my review copy I have the promo PDF and the 10 tracks in the format that they were mastered in, 16-bit/44.1kHz but with track 1 being in 16-bit/48kHz and track 8 in 32-bit/44.1kHz. Several tracks on this compilation are indeed remastered or remixed but the sound quality is consistently great throughout and there’s no jumps in loudness too. Now let’s jump into the 10 tracks featured on this 10 Years Compilation.

10 Years Compilation starts with Zen Garden, a lush atmospheric piece that can bring you into a quite relaxing state of mine as suggested with the title. Featuring calm minimalist clean guitar melodies over a warm flowing mellow drone and subtle field recordings of crickets the piece is the quietest track on the whole compilation but already does have some mystery within its summery warm ambience. Tube-like resonant tones flow through the piece like the eerily braking distant trains and the phaser effected sound of the guitar gives it a bit of a more psychedelic edge than other pieces on this compilation. Clanging metallic sounds like the bells ringing near a railroad crossing add some surreal imagery to the mixture which sounds both calming but also a bit foreboding. A sweet calm start to the compilation. Human Or Not follows which moves us into darker, more dystopian territory, featuring an electronic ambience that’s a bit more stripped back the piece revolves a lot around the heavier distorted melodic guitar phrases that tumble and scatter around the stereo field. The atmosphere we have here is more one of a certain threat, uncertainty about the future, an inner struggle. With the title Human Or Not you can already guess that indeed there’s some kind of question the music seems to ask continuously. Am I Human, is this technologically ever advancing world overtaking the humanity and natural things? The flowing drone background is ominous in its subdued texture through which sharper tones periodically chime like an alarm tone sneakily disguised as a friendly notification sound whilst the guitar expresses the aforementioned struggle through sad repeated tones, gliding and brittle clicking string noises. Like on the previous piece Zen Garden, guitar and electronics interplay in this track in a great manner with both elements embracing each other in waves of tone and sound that rise and fall in an almost improvisatory manner with both guitar and electronics at times rising to the foreground to express their urgency or fragile underlying emotions. On the next track Fetus Crying Gamardah Fungus brings us a more straight-forward piece of music which follows a more traditional compositional structure. The piece is pretty much a slow droning Metal track though the drums of the track are actually looped drum recordings rather than a studio recording of drums with slow sombre clean guitar riffs slowly building towards a distorted hazy distorted climax until building towards the clean ending melodies of the piece that softly fade out afterwards. In terms of sounds the piece is not the most distinct track on this compilation with the electronics taking quite a background position here, though vinyl crackles can be heard alongside the guitar and drums giving it a bit of a different flavour but it’s an enjoyable good and intense track nonetheless and keeps up the dark eerie ambience we’ve gotten into from Am I Human onwards rather well. With Clean Eyes Of My Childhood Gamardah Fungus returns to the drone-based approach of their music in a piece which features some tasty creative improvisational aspects to the guitar performance as well as an eerily calm pulsating quality to the drone driving the piece. Sergey Yagoda plays introspective and contemplating melodic phrases which he breaks up more and more with clicking, at times wooden sounding string noises and harmonics which combined with the reversed delay on the guitar add to the organic narrative quality of the guitar. Igor Yalivec’s electronics follow more of slow crescendo in this piece with the warm resonant pulsating drone often showcasing a rich brightness every time it rises, soft cello-like tones also fading in around half-way into the piece to ever grow in intensity in the second half though never overshadowing Sergey’s guitar. With its intriguing combination of warm electronics and a free-flowing guitar performance which carries rawer distorted sonics the piece makes for a great listening experience blending lush “classical” Ambient elements with Avant-Garde improvisation. Afterwards on Sea Salt (with Monocube) we dive into darker territory, with Monocube’s deeply flowing electronics centred in the stereo image, Gamardah Fungus’ layers within the piece, guitar and sampled drums make for a cinematic sombre listening experience that again feels quite “classic” in its approach with the music feeling quite organic and like a live performance. Feeling quite like the soundtrack to the environment of a deserted landscape or a terrifyingly quiet city Sergey’s guitar performance leads the piece with subtly narrating, clicky melodic phrases, a times running through crunchy edge of high-end distortion. Monocube’s electronics create a metallic river of mysteriously flowing droning tones and wide stereo-panned high pitched screeches, not quite emitting a feeling of dread but things aren’t looking to good for us they seem to be saying. The scattering low pitch-shifted drums and vinyl crackle add abstract percussive elements to the piece that aren’t driving the music but rather seem to be rhythmically transported shards and debris of demolished buildings and rubble, not very harsh but quite murky definitely. The rising and falling pulsating quality to Monocube’s electronics do remind me a bit of the previous track but have a more Industrial quality to them, being less glowing and more inherently metallic. This is definitely a great mixture of Gamardah Fungus’ sombre droning atmosphere’s with Monocube’s refined approach to Dark Ambient, a fine piece of music again. Forester Blues follows, which is a much lighter piece of music in comparison. Featuring more minimalistic electronics in the form of a looped field recording recorded in a forest forming the backing of Sergey’s guitar the piece feels more like a melodic natural soundscape. The melodic phrases on guitar are this time repeated by a looping pedal / device with which an ever growing structure of looped layers of melody, overtones as well as subtly scratchy tones is created, flowing in a calm but also mysterious fashion creating the ambience of sitting somewhere in the middle of the forest around a little campfire at night hearing all the surrounding sounds of shifting leaves and wolf-like noises. These aforementioned sounds can be directly heard in the field recording in which the guitar is placed as if the sound is softly reverberating in the forest. Besides describing the ambience of the forest this piece could also be interpreted as actually being the soundtrack to a walk through the forest at night, with the ever increasing number of looped guitar layers expressing the ever-increasing awareness we suddenly get whilst discovering all corners of the forest, the secret nocturnal animal activities that are suddenly laid bare to us. All in all, it’s an intriguing different sonic approach Gamardah Fungus brings to us here and another great chapter within this increasingly varied sounding compilation. Afterwards we have the last original track on 10 Years Compilation, Kyiv Underground. At 13:56 minutes it’s the longest track on here and also the most guitar-focussed one with the piece essentially consisting of an extended guitar solo by Sergey backed by manipulated hazy and Noise like field recordings by Igor creating the most Metal / Noise like music that you can find on here. Sergey’s solo is focussed around a dark dramatic droning note that he returns to quite often as the base of the swirling melodic phrases that plays. The phrases have quite a lot of passion and energy within them, with Sergey varying the melody from screeching wails to wavering overtone rich laments, afterwards returning to the base tone with ever-increasing thick layers of noisy gritty distortion. The melodies start of quite slow at the beginning of the piece but move towards fiery high-pitched speed acrobatics that still do carry the dread-filled mysterious ambience that’s much enhanced by Igor Yalivec’s murky and strange sonic manipulations. These manipulations include the sounds of the metro underground, including an announcers voice, noises from the subway trains themselves as well as indiscernible bits of voice and vary from ghostly washes to strangely electronic blips as well. It also sounds like Igor’s manipulating the guitar melodies themselves too at times with tones at times sounding like falling into hazily diffuse shadows of darkness adding to the stereo delay effect that already makes for a nice scattered effect of the guitar melodies. Kyiv Underground is the most melody driven piece but also one of the darkest and noisiest on the compilation without the layers blending too much into each other. It showcases Gamardah Fungus’ harsher and more abstracted side rather well and I feel this piece could also be a great entry point for listeners with more Noise / Industrial oriented tastes. Afterwards we got the first of the three Submatukana remixes that close off the compilation which is the Submatukana Remix of Burning Church of Eternal Sorrow. As mentioned in my introduction these remixes fall into the Drum & Bass territory mixed with influences from other related styles and this first remix indeed does feature some nice breaks and buzzing bass tones accompanying the chopped up guitar melody. In the remix Submatukana use this guitar melody in a looped manner as the melodic base around which the synths and bass hover featuring a warm bell-like “classic” Drum & Bass style tinkling melody as well as rhythmic pulsation in the bass synth line. The breaks themselves are quite familiar sounding in nature but Submatukana does chop them up rather nicely and they build up the remix in a quite progressive manner, gradually increasing the number of layers and afterwards dissecting them in a subtle manner. Just like the two remixes to follow the music is more straight-forward in nature than the original pieces but the music is nicely produced and enjoyable as it never gets repetitive. One thing I did notice however is that these remixes, like unfortunately happens more often with Drum & Bass tracks have rather boosted high frequencies in the mastering which make the hi-hats and cymbals become a bit washy and close to masking some of the other instruments but the sound quality is still good in any case. The Submatukana Remix of Advocatus Diaboli which follows uses more of the melody from the original track to build up the remix with a large chunk of the distorted guitar melody mixed with clean arpeggios being used as base of the bass melody of the piece. Sombre and dramatic in nature the melody gives off a great doom-laden ambience which mixed with the full-bodied breaks and scrunchy bass makes for an energetic piece of music but there are also some nice creative touches beyond this like the Ukrainian (?) voice sample and funky electric piano in the first half of the remix adding some quirky vibes to the remix as well as some sweet filter usage on the breaks in the second half of the remix. Definitely a fun and varied listen. After this we have the third Submatukana Remix and final track from the 10 Years Compilation, which is of the track Opium. I’d say that in approach this one is the most minimalist with Sergey’s moody dense guitar melodies being mostly used as a hazy background to a quite stretched out section of squelchy bass wobbles forming the Dubstep inspired sound of the remix. The drums are a bit further back in this remix being more a programmed but also crunchy distorted type of Industrial Techno rhythms. At the end of the remix we do have a rather nice section of glitchy tones and clanging metallic percussion too. Overall the remix makes a pretty interesting Eastern Asian kind of mystery out of the dense guitar melody from the original track with flute like synth enhancing this influence and the bass wobbles are varied enough to keep the energy at a consistent level throughout the remix. A fine closing track to this excellent compilation. With 10 Years Compilation, Gamardah Fungus brings us a great varied selection of original tracks and sweet remixes that showcases both their warm atmospheric and their darker more mysterious side. The creative merging of flowing, pulsating electronic and field recordings of Igor Yalivec and Sergey’s passionate and at times improvisational guitar performances makes for a compilation that takes you on a sonic journey to various emotional states of mind as well as walking through the rich mysteries of nature. I award this compilation a Polar Visions Amplitude of 95 dB. I highly recommend this compilation and there’s plenty of great music in here for both fans of lush Ambient and more experimental darker styles of underground music. Check this out.

You can purchase 10 Years Compilation on CD as well as a download from the Gamardah Fungus Bandcamp page here: https://gamardahfungus.bandcamp.com/album/10-years-compilation-singles-rarities-remixes

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fluidsf · 4 years ago

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Polar Visions Amplitude Listening Set 1 - Daniel Menche exploration - Reviewing:

Daniel Menche - Soundtrack for the book "D'entre les morts"

Self-released on November 12, 2018 by Daniel Menche  Reviewed format: 16-bit/44.1kHz ALAC download of the EP

Connected listening: further self-released works and reissues by Daniel Menche on his Bandcamp page (https://danielmenche.bandcamp.com/music)

The second release in this first Listening Set (which is now fully themed around exploring releases by Daniel Menche) on Polar Visions Amplitude is Soundtrack for the book "D'entre les morts”, a digital reissue of a soundtrack that Menche made for the novel D'entre les morts by Guillaume Belhomme and which was originally released with this same soundtrack included with the book published by Éditions Lenka Lente. The French publisher / label has released numerous other novels with accompanying soundtracks by Nurse With Wound, Vomir, Andrew Liles, My Cat Is An Alien and others as well as several books on Jazz and Avant-Garde music, at times in bilingual editions. As Menche mentions in the description of the download of this release the story of D'entre les morts is about a man on a train who’s eating glass. Menche’s approach to soundtrack such a strange story was indeed to use various sounds of crunched glass and trains but the result is even more eerie than you could guess from the description itself. This piece is more cyclic in nature than Desiccation but equally strong and immersive in nature as you will find out soon. In the case of this reissue you’ll find the music in the form of a single CD quality track, identical to the physical mini-CD but with cover artwork by Menche, a dark grayscale photo (in line with the other releases on Menche’s Bandcamp page) of what looks like a tree-trunk but also eeriely seems to resemble a skull of some wild animal, intriguing imagery. Let’s dive into this soundtrack now.

Soundtrack for the book "D'entre les morts” carries some similarities in sonic approach to Desiccation, even though the source materials used are much more of a mixture of acoustic and electronic elements with the piece being built using quite clearly defined layers, some of which hover around the stereo field. These layers can be separated into metallic, screechy and squelchy electronic. The metallic layers form the main drones that carry the piece forward, a mixture of glowing resonant struck iron, hammered metal bars (sounding somewhere between a coat hanger and the kind of triangle “bell” you sometimes see in prisons in films announcing food breaks) as well as further overtones that are audible especially in the first half of the piece. The screechy sounds in the piece are all the layered train recordings of which especially the train brakes give them a note of harshness but besides the brake sounds you can also hear some clattering, wooden like sonic details from the trains. Menche hasn’t utilised the train sounds in a very explicit manner in this piece, feeling more like an accompaniment to the metal works than a steady clattering rhythm that is a bit obvious as others might have used them which does elevate these sounds above connecting them too much to their own source. The squelchy electronic sounds add a bit of Noise to the mixture, mostly aesthetically pleasing but in the second half growing in intention, the stream of the water like liquid scratchy texture appears to imagine the novel character’s disturbed brain in quite a literal but on-point manner. As I mentioned in the introduction, this soundtrack features a more cyclic kind of composition in which the separate layers are active in various phases, some short, some longer. The hammered iron droning appears for the majority of the piece and changes ever so slightly in pitch though the tones themselves mostly stay the same and is working together with the iron resonances in the first half of the piece, in the second half these hammered tones become much more prominent however, also becoming a bit more minimalistic and repetitive in nature. This does make the second half feel a bit more focussed on the “deep” of the deep listening method of experiencing this piece as the effect of these tones creeps into the mind mostly as a kind of hypnosis with some of the other sounds falling a bit out of focus (in my experience at least) but it does allow the squelchy electronics to subtly grow more intense in this second half to eventually overtake the main focus of the piece in the ending fade-out of the piece, a crackling soup of crunchy noise softly seeping away into the distance. Looking into the general immersive effect that this soundtrack has on the mind I felt that besides the actual story from the novel the piece especially relates to a kind of hyper-sensitivity of sounds. The imagery conjured up in my mind was especially that of a man locked up in the living room of his house, scared of all the sounds around him, whether its a chiming old clock or even a bit of creaking in the walls, all sounds appear to be piercing into his ears and mind likes knives stabbing him. The subtle minor / major key shifts of the resonant drones of this piece also further hint at an unstable state of mind with the piece never quite falling into a musical kind of “tones” or chords but remaining in that signature Menche field of eerie abstract tones. The aforementioned cyclic nature of this piece also makes the piece feel quite more like a summary of events, layered over each other rather than the traditional progressive form of a soundtrack / soundtrack composition but the variations that do appear over time still do keep the piece flowing forward too even though dramatic events never happen within the piece. Soundtrack for the book "D'entre les morts” is another great entry in Daniel Menche’s extensive discography and features some crisp mastering by experimental musician Andrew Liles who creates very interesting and imaginative solo music as well as part of several avant-garde groups the most well-known of which Nurse With Wound. Liles especially brought out some great warmth in the mid and high frequencies of the spectrum and brought out both the sharpness of the metals and the clarity of clattering and squelchy sonic elements in the mix. I award this soundtrack a Polar Visions Amplitude of 95 dB. This is another highly recommended listen within Menche’s discography and once again showcases Menche's imaginative, enjoyable and deeply felt creativity in the field of abstract Drone inspired Industrial music.

You can get Soundtrack for the book "D'entre les morts” in download format from Daniel Menche’s Bandcamp page here: https://danielmenche.bandcamp.com/album/soundtrack-for-the-book-dentre-les-morts

#Polar Visions Amplitude #daniel menche #Soundtrack for the book D'entre les morts #ep review #self-release #2018 #reissue #lenka lente #andrew liles #industrial music #drone music #eerie #abstract #soundtrack #atmospheres #dark #metallic resonances #immersive #pva

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fluidsf · 4 years ago

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Polar Visions Amplitude Listening Set 1 - Reviewing:

Daniel Menche - Desiccation

Self-released on January 7, 2019 by Daniel Menche    Reviewed format: 24-bit/44.1kHz ALAC download of the album

Connected listening: further self-released works and reissues by Daniel Menche on his Bandcamp page (https://danielmenche.bandcamp.com/music)

The first release in the first listening set of my new Polar Visions Amplitude writing project focused on Noise, Power Electronics and further radical and obscure underground sonics is the 2019 album Desiccation by Daniel Menche. Daniel Menche is an American abstract sound musician who is active since around the start of the 1990s, with his first releases being in the form of self-released cassette tapes. Later on in this same period Menche released albums on Soleilmoon Recordings, Aube’s G.R.O.S.S. tape label, Banned Productions but also Bernard Günter’s Trente Oiseaux which released many albums falling into the lowercase style of radically soft Sound Art and experimental music. Over the years Menche has also collaborated with a number of well-known names in the Noise and experimental music scene including KK Null, John Wiese, Joe Preston and Kevin Drumm. Daniel Menche has self-released a lot of his recent works on his Bandcamp in digital format and recently limited edition physical releases but also keeps regularly putting out his own unique style of abstract immersive sonics through labels like Moving Furniture Records, Beacon Sound, Touch and SIGE. Desiccation is a self-released 4 track album released as a high-resolution 24-bit/44.1kHz download and features some great artwork by Menche himself in the form of the black and white photograph of the desiccating landscape which fittingly matches the sound of the drones contained within as you’re about to find out.

Desiccation is split up into four parts, all of which are separate pieces, starting with Part One the album begins with what I feel is the core drone imagining the eerie, hypnotic but also quite entrancing textures and tones of the desiccation of the earth, the earth getting totally dry (as can be seen on the album cover). In this first part we also get introduced to Menche’s approach to layering his drones, textures and noises in most parts of this album, he builds this piece out of a continuous steady one-note drone, folding out into multiple layers of texture and fuzzy metallic noises that at times return in different modulated variations but often fade in and out of each other in an unpredictable yet also cyclic manner. Looking at the elements contained within the first part we can find tonal material, hissing mechanical textures, low shifting bass tones as well as hidden filtered tonal clouds being somewhat hidden in the mixture. The tonal material is what I found to be some of the most clear in pointing towards the subject as there is quite a prominent focus on the ever falling and rising sharp synth drones that feel like a sonification of the slowly drying, stretching mass of earth, gripping around it, crumbling and at this same slow pace ever changing the texture around it in the burning sunshine. Alongside these rising and falling tones we also have a more steady main drone synth, grounding the key of the other drones in place, quite resonant and sharp too, it forms the tonal background on which all elements hover. There is some movement in overtones within it however, so this drone isn’t really laying idle at all. Another great aspect about the rising and falling drones is that they also have this amusing speeding up and slowing down engine kind of quality to them which does make the Industrial influence in the piece clearer but they’re not quite that harsh or distorted to overtake from the organic nature from this part. Moving to the hissing mechanical textures, these elaborate further on the Industrial elements within this part by adding whirring movement to the earth crumbling process of desiccation, heating up the earth even and also add new dissonant lower pitched fuzz like hazes of wind flowing over the earth. High pitched metallic resonance peaks into the mixture quite early on as well, adding a layer of glimmering colours that is a bit piercing but again not overwhelming, iron like high pitched clangs feature later on in the piece as well. The low shifting bass tones then form the general magnitude of the earth, at times moving the key of the drones into mysterious different places or forming a rumbling layer of underground movement. Especially on speakers with good bass or when using a subwoofer this low end layer is quite an impressive mass of shifting frequencies that is quite filtered and separate but plays a great role in creating this earth landscape through sound, a unique approach to bass. Finally the tonal clouds which fade into the picture at various moments throughout the piece form these bending organic tones, almost like a question mark in sound that have this spooky but also intriguing subconscious effect of making you think of something unknown lurking in this soundscape, an animal perhaps or some other unknown visitor. All in all, a great start of the album and with its Industrial elements Menche immediately lets us know he’s not here to give us relaxing New Age drones but proper dark immersive metallic and resonant textures that keep intriguing on every listen. On Part One Menche moves into more abstract harsher territory whilst still retaining some of the signature elements from Part One like the high pitched metallic bits, mysterious swirling tonal cloud and resonances. In this part however, the sonic material is focussed on a more mechanical type of sonic imagery, feeling much like mining activities within a mountain landscape, these activities might actually occur in parts where the earth isn’t that dried out yet. The discernible layers in this part are more in a competition with each other than in part one and without a base drone that grounds the key of the other drones and tones hovering around the piece has a more dissonant and mysteriously unpredictable sound to it, laying somewhere in between stripped back Dark Ambient atmospheres and purely Industrial piercing tones and active machinery. The piece’s drones never quite move in a single direction together, instead at times mashing with each other but often trying to move ever and ever more forward in the sonic image (often in intensity or moving very far into the left or right channel). The low frequencies are a bit steadier in this part, moving along with the machinery and after the beginning of the piece the phased tonal synth layers are subtly moving back to make space for harsher mining activity. Key elements of the quality of Menche’s work in this piece are especially the aforementioned piercing metallic resonances as well as distorted hazy and hot-like whirring, engine sounds and rubble clatter that give this part a magnified physical aspect. As a listening experience the piece forms a great combination of both the Industrial aspect letting you as the listener focus on the abrasive yet intriguing sonics of Industrial equipment as well as letting you dive into the strangely entrancing qualities of the constant activity, diffusion of sound and intensifying textures that are intense but always changing in such great ways. Part Three sonically appears to describe the daily in a city built within a dry mountain landscape until eventually giving way to more Industrial elements, continuing the mining activities like sounds from Part Two. In this third part Menche lets the layers flow more into each other independently over the 20 minutes with the especially the start of the piece carrying a more melodic filtered ambience backing the foreground elements consisting of sharp drones, buzzing metallic drill and further saturated metallic elements. The melodic filtered ambience at the beginning forms a diffuse undefined but intriguing “upbeat” element within the piece which puts the Industrial mechanics into a brighter warmer light. We can also hear the rising and falling, engine like whirring tones return in this piece within its first half, though not quite as prominent and hissy and within the context still feeling different than in Part One. In this third part especially the movement, increasing saturation of the metallic elements is an aspect that I find particularly great, combined with the fact that Menche places these elements in more of a low-end vacuum background, making them eerily sharply focussed. There’s a lot of movement in these mechanical elements but in this third part not just drilling but moving in wide stereo, rotation shifting from left to right independently, machinery moving in the wide space of the piece like a living organism. The growing saturation of the metallic machinery enriches their resonant qualities, adds noise, body and loudness to them but also gives them an earth-like extra physical quality. Like the other parts of Desiccation, the layers and elements never quite move in a predictable manner, even though climaxes at times almost seem to occur. The low frequencies in this third part give the background ambience body and add some nice bass rumble to the Industrial mechanics, they're often very low but grounded low frequencies that give different sensations and movement to every part on this album. Final piece Part Four of Desiccation concludes the album with what sounds like the earth crust eventually opening up. Consisting of many now familiar layers including the warm mixed mysteriously diffuse tonal drones, metallic elements, hissing mechanical activities and saturated high pitched washes of sounds, Menche rounds off the album in quite a circular manner, somewhat moving back to the beginning in terms of elements used but the effect is quite different from the other pieces even though these elements don’t differ as much in terms of their sonic signature. While the piece is still somewhat subtle and gradual in its progression, Menche sounds quite fiery in the way he moves in and manipulates the various layers in this fourth part in an even more but also seemingly more aggressive manner (aggressive in the sense that resonant piercing Industrial elements are being pushed quite a bit forward and he leaves less quieter moments within the piece, instead opting for more of a climax or crescendo style of composition. Out of the wildly left and right scattering tonal and mechanic elements from the beginning the cracking of the earth erupts full of strange intriguing activities, organic, lava filled matter, the bendy tonal cloud swooping once again through the landscape, this time cleaner and more urgent in nature and the ever changing nature of the landscape through the more improvised sounding on-the-fly flow of fluid sonic manipulations. It’s a great cathartic finale to Desiccation and I feel Menche’s unique style mixes at times eerie dark (Industrial) ambience with a mysterious yet somehow hopeful kind of sonic bliss that is quite a bit more like a whole free sonic experience rather than mere music constricted by compositional or stylistic requirements. Timothy Stollenwerk’s analog mastering at Stereophonic Mastering brought out some wonderful thick rumbling low frequencies, made the saturated elements feel extra crunchy and fierce and brought out the many layers of Menche’s music here in the clearest and most dynamic manner so it’s good to credit him too here obviously. I award this album a Polar Visions Amplitude of 100 dB, this is highly recommended listening. More reviews of other works by Menche are coming up through Polar Visions Amplitude soon, so stay tuned.

You can buy the download of Desiccation from Daniel Menche’s Bandcamp page (as well as get many of his other releases) here: https://danielmenche.bandcamp.com/album/desiccation

#Polar Visions Amplitude #album review #daniel menche #desiccation #2019 #24-bit audio #album download #bandcamp #pva #drone music #industrial #dark ambient #mysterious #immersive #soundscape #organic

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