Blog

1 January 2000
By Carlos M Pozo in Angbase (USA), January 1, 2000

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“Those of us who admire musique concrète for its disorienting power will find much to enjoy on this disc.”

Erik M is a young French musician who has a CD out on the French Sonoris label, and played turntables in Otomo Yoshihide’s Les Sculpteurs de Vinyl supergroup (“Memory & Money” CD on Stupeur et Trompette! 1997). This CD is a work that uses as its sound sources the Cinema pour l’oreille 3" CDs on the Metamkine label. This is more than just a mix CD - the sound that dominates most is that of the CD disc skip, or “disc jam,” the startling moment when a glitch on the surface of the disc makes the music stop on a single stuttering tone. The disc skip just emphasizes the digital nature of the compact disc medium - the music, either as it bounces uncontrollably, or becomes stuck on one single loop of noise, is audibly reduced to streaming bits of unintelligible data. The resulting tracks resemble a twitchy abstract insect symphony, full of busy, seemingly random sound actions. The disc starts off very sparse - short snippets of sound followed by seconds of silence. The sounds grow in density but remain restrained as they play out within what is obviously a carefully planned structure. An impressive array of stereo effects is displayed within these 18 minutes of music, divided into 4 tracks. Track 3, the longest piece at 9:51 features a stuttering drone that emerges out of silence and dissipates into another uneasy silence, and then expands into some high speed sounds, panning, and disc skips. I haven’t heard many of the Metamkine discs this is based on (003 through 025) so I cannot say how discernible the music in the originals is. Those of us who admire musique concrète for its disorienting power will find much to enjoy on this disc.

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