Mechanical Wave (digital radiophonic, glitch, databending) ~ Gen Thalz

Music, video, and lyrics by Gen Thalz

THE ALCHEMY OF SOUNDS:

I think sometimes the role of a person who makes music is to take these everyday noises that are ugly and make them beautiful, and by this they doing magic ~ Bjork (singer-songwriter)

*No well-known musical instruments were used in the making of this music or sounds. No notes, notation, complex scale, or any simple chords. All sounds were made of random noises we collected, recorded and mutated, except for the human voice.

Ingredients:

1. Personal sound of morning piss on a Pik-Nik (original) can.
2. Wine Glass harping.
3. Crumpled newspaper.
4. Rubber band, plucked.
5. Stapler, pressed several times.
6. Comb scraping with hairpin.
7. Shake water jug.

We call the technique used in this music or sound as "Digital Radiophonic" or "Databending". It is a digital version of the original techniques such as Radiophonic and Music Concrete were composers use magnetic tape, morphophone and other recording devices available at that time to record and manipulate raw sounds from anything they could find on their surroundings or "found sound" like frying pan, spoon and fork etc. They manipulate these recorded sounds by changing its speed or tempo, altering the pitch, distort it, reversed, apply effects like echo, delay, flanger and so on to create new weird, strange, out of this world sound.

One of the key figure in radiophonic is Delia Derbyshire (musician, composer of electronic music, and music concrete), they call her "The Sculptress of Sound". Best known for her electronic realization of Doctor Who theme music (BBC science fiction television, 1960's).

The only difference between Digital Radiophonic and the original Radiophonic itself is the device use. Here we only used computer, music editor software, and a ordinary microphone use for chatting but the process is much like the original radiophonic, only we manipulate sounds as wave form on the music editor software and we want to be minimal in a sense, and to be sound more like glitch music similar to the works of Alva Noto, Ryoji Ikeda, Pan Sonic, and Kabutogani.

However glitch music is primarily made of computer or any machine sound errors. So what we basically do here is creating a glitch sound using radiophonic/music concrete technique and databend digitally.

It's not complex or technical and not so simple as well, but more detailed (fussy) and time consuming, so you would put a lot of effort just to create a 1 minute or 3 minutes music piece out of the abstract sounds you may find wherever they came from.

Digitally it's not that easy, what more for the original radiophonic and music concrete were they cut and paste magnetic tape manually to produce unconventional sounds? But it's really worth the journey, especially if you're into experimental music or sound art.

Music concrete, radiophonic, glitch music, and digital radiophonic is a new look or another way of composing presented by means of non-traditional way of making music. Collecting any form of noises or sounds then turning it - the abstract, errors, and chaos of sounds into order. As Pierre Henry (pioneer of the musique concrète genre of electronic music.) states:

"Musique concrète, in my opinion ... led to a manner of composing, indeed, a new mental framework of composing".