Mutant Technology – Anomaly Index

T. Gowdy – Miracles (Constellation Records, 2022)

Constellation Records, the Montréal label indelibly associated with the Godspeed You! Black Emperor family tree, is still alive and well. GY!BE extended relatives like Fly Pan Am and Esmerine still comprise a portion of the imprint’s activity, but this is rounded out by the work of other artists, among them T. Gowdy, a sound producer/engineer and native Montréaler. For the record, The T. stands for Tim.

Gowdy’s name may not be household, but Miracles is a real treat. The basis for this album was an aborted multimedia project around the theme of video surveillance. Gowdy tells me that this project arose around 2016, in Berlin, where he was squatting in one of the recording studios in the Funkhaus – a cultural hub that developed out of an old building located in what used to be East Germany. “The walls still have wires and bugs everywhere,” he tells me. A friend suggested to him that he take analog audio equipment and connect it into video equipment, like old TVs and VCRs, via a video mixer. “The result was this kind of distortion to the image (even if there was no image, just blank) that became a fundamentally life changing moment for me. I went on to start performing audio visual sets using this technique. This is also known as glitch art, something I found out after a while.”

“Anyway, during this time in Berlin, I had some TVs but I had no source, like no video images. I wanted live video images.” He was also inspired by the unique hallways of the Funkhaus building, combined with its history of Soviet-era surveillance. “You’re floating on these massive floors filled with horsehair to combat mold. It feels like you are on a different plane, but just 30 years ago every move was being watched.”

In his travels, he happened upon the perfect resource: a building that was, as he puts it, “a graveyard for old video equipment in West Berlin.” There he picked up a few surveillance cameras, which he connected to his computer via long cables. The idea was to collect this surveillance footage – audio and video – which he could then use to create sound art in a collaged, musique concrete vein. “The video feed was definitely driving the feeling of the sound,” he reflects. “It was sparse and minimal, no beginning or end, kind of ominous, distorted.”

When he returned to Montréal in 2017, he continued to experiment with surveillance footage. Using a video mixer, he would have video footage playing in one channel of his video mixer; however, in the other video channel, he would instead run audio data, which would lead to a distortion of the final image. He sourced his surveillance footage himself, recording video from archetypally urban locations: an underpass, a subway station, the exterior of an office building.

He produced music as a soundtrack to these surveillance collages, which became the initial version of Miracles, though at the time he spelled it “Miraclz.” “These audiovisual pieces captured an essence of something,” he explains. “At this point I was becoming more and more obsessed with the current landscape of surveillance. How it used to be considered, 20 to 70 years ago, an ominous thing but now surveillance is functioning part of the way we relate to one another socially and economically. It’s the foundation of so many things. Algorithmically, watching, listening, packaging, selling, helping us to make our lives easier, connecting.” Some of this project can be seen in a 2018 performance he did for Montreal’s electronic festival, MUTEK:

After this, however, he shelved this project until 2021, when he stumbled upon it while he was experimenting with vactrols, an electronic component that is used in modular analogue synthesizers. This occurred at a time when he was spending time with his friend, visual artist Laura Buckley, who unfortunately passed away this year. They were experimenting with an old camcorder she owned. “We found some old tapes of her using the camera in like the nineties to record some guys building a theatre set,” he says. “There were sparks everywhere it looked really good on the LED screen monitor of the camcorder. This I think played a big part in my new experiments. I wanted to get closer to the sound of electricity and use it musically.”

Gowdy explains that vactrols are “basically frequency filters that open and close very quickly when they hear an impulse. They open and close very quickly because there is a light detector. The impulse can be from anything and when it strikes, the vactrol closes giving a very woody percussive sound. They can open and close so quickly that it sounds like electricity to my ears. Or more like the envelope and speed of electricity with the timbre of wood.”

To create the final Miracles, he took sound from his original Miraclz work and ran it through the vactrols, making them “into woody sparks,” as he puts it. The woodiness indeed comes through, for example in the clipped, thudding rhythms of “Vidisions”. The album also often has a digitally fuzzy sound, like a tenth-generation digital photocopy – a screenshot of a screenshot of a screenshot, ad infinitum. It’s an aesthetic not far from touchstone works like Alva Noto’s Xerrox series and, yes, William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops (which is doomed to be perpetually invoked in these cases). Miracles’ main focus is its engrossing synthesized sound, but Gowdy explains there are traces of the audio from the surveillance footage buried within.

Miracles is not the only Gowdy work with a concept revolving around technology. His last album, Therapy With Colour, was based on an unusual device called a sound mind machine, a pseudoscientific apparatus that emits pulses of sound, purportedly to alter the listener’s brainwaves. This has been coopted by charlatans who have marketed them as everything from meditation aids to quick “home hypnosis” solutions for medical illnesses and underwhelming love lives. Though Gowdy doesn’t endorse any of these metaphysical properties, he does tell me that Therapy With Colour was inspired by a positive experience with a sound mind machine. “I discovered the mind machine at [singer/songwriter and Majical Cloudz frontman] Devon Welsh’s mother’s house in San Francisco, while I was on tour playing guitar for his solo project,” he says. “I just put on the headphones and started zoning. I found it to be a useful experience because it could, in a very primitive way, affect the direction of your thoughts. I had been looking for a way to disassociate myself from patterns in my life. The experiments with the sound mind machine showed me that I could disassociate from thought patters by subjecting myself to minute rhythmic shifts, dissolving perceptions. I wanted to direct an album with this in mind.”

One can see a connection between Therapy With Colour and Miracles, in that both records explore highly specific technologies using electronic music. Both are worthy of your attention: they are not excruciating conceptual exercises, but absorbing and compelling digital collages that tickle the brain.

Miracles can be sampled, and purchased at T. Gowdy’s Bandcamp page.

Jung/Frye – Phantom Acid digital (2022, Superpang)

Superpang, a record label named after an obscure Super Nintendo game, is all about exploring strange musical concepts. Famous for their distinctive, text-only covers, this Rome-based netlabel has produced a sprawling discography since their 2020 debut, Guy Birkin’s Liminal Kicks. That unique record was a collection of algorithmically produced club tracks driven by supraphysiological tempos that shifted in exponents according to the Golden ratio, reaching a ceiling of 300,000 beats per minute!

Phantom Acid is yet another experiment from the Superpang clan. Twenty-four tracks, each one precisely 90 seconds in length, make up this unusual disc – which is described, in its press release, as post-human. In truth, this is the work of two producers, each with their own aesthetic, and each armed with their own digital tools.

Eric Frye is known for his audio experiments with the human voice. For example: Obfuscation Morphologies, an album in which he used software to alter recordings of speech, stripping them of their actual words. Deprived of verbal content, the voices became vague and unnerving utterances divorced of identity and context. In an interview with The Wire, he described this as a comment on privacy in the digital age. He sees his musical use of the voice-stripping software as a way of subverting the typical use case for these computer programs, which he believes are destined to be co-opted by big companies to nefarious ends. “I feel like I’ll find something like this voice obscuring process and I’ll be so happy to use it to see what it does,” he explained then. “These processes have a lot of power, and they should actively be shared with artists and musicians, people who are a wider audience in general. It shouldn’t just be relegated to a corporate structure, that’s going to take this and implement it into a smartphone or something, and have back doors to it or whatever.” In their corresponding notes, Frye’s productions will credit the programmers responsible for creating this software, and reference articles from linguistics journals – clearly, his sonic output goes hand in hand with the highly technical process he makes use of.

On Phantom Acid, Frye’s voice manipulations are fifty percent of the equation. The other half is the work of Jung An Tagen (born Stefan Juster), who turns the deconstructed phonemes into loops and converts them into strange approximations of rave music. Tagen, a veteran producer who has explored many different avenues of sound, lately has been focused on computer music – borrowing processes from ‘academic’ music and using them produce strange deconstructions of electronic dance music.

The ideas behind Phantom Acid make reference to other sound work. Psychologist Diana Deutsch used to run experiments where she would play looped recordings of single words to study participants, offsetting the left and right speaker channels. Eventually, the subjects would hear “phantom words” in the din: new words, made up words, words in foreign accents, etc. The same effect is embedded in Phantom Acid, both the work and title. But Phantom Acid’s most proximal connection is to their labelmates, EVOL, a hyperproductive duo who have concocted a whole host of sonic experiments and who claim to create “computer music for hooligans.” One of EVOL’s recurrent projects has been their spoofs on rave music, dubbed “rave synthesis,” in which they use computers to take sonic signatures of dance music and turn them on their head. To wit: their 100 Variations For Solo Hoover, which took a synthesized sound that was a mainstay of 90s rave music (the custom synth tone known as the “Hoover sound,” in reference to its auditory resemblance to a vacuum) and dissected it stochastically into one hundred separate compositions. (It was released in an edition of 100 CD-Rs, each copy containing one of the different variations such that no two were identical). You can imagine what their 2009 cassette, Fart Synthesis, was all about.

Listening to Phantom Acid is a jarring experience – the fragmentary tracks are punctuated by blebs of white noise, resisting the tendency toward passive engagement that often occurs with electronic music. Even the simplest tracks – e.g. a simple phoneme, looped – are undeniably rhythmic. Jung/Frye’s experiments reach their most sublime when the complexity is upscaled, quasi-melodies and basslines appearing amid the bedlam. Whether it is something to enjoy on a primal level, or merely to be appreciated on an intellectual one, is up for debate.

Norbert Möslang – Capture CD (Cut, 2004)

“How does a bicycle light sound?”

It’s a question that Norbert Möslang, a Swiss sound artist who specializes in “cracking” everyday electronics to unleash their sonic properties, posed in a short 2004 article in the Leonardo Music Journal, a peer reviewed journal published by MIT Press.

It’s also a question that reflects the aesthetic of Capture, a peculiar CD he put out on the Cut label in 2004.

A great profile in Paris Transatlantic magazine summarizes Möslang’s development as an artist. Born in 1952 in St. Gallen, he apparently taught himself how to play soprano saxophone, performing improvised sets through the 1970s. At that time, he also began his long-standing collaboration with Andy Guhl. Together, they would form the pioneering experimental act Voice Crack, though their first release, a 1978 improv LP titled Deep Voices, was credited to their own names, and today commands over a hundred dollars per copy. That LP, as pointed out in the Paris Transatlantic article, is noteworthy because of some subtle credits on the back cover. The instruments involved include “home made instruments” and a “tape recorder,” hinting at a move beyond traditional instrumentation, and towards repurposing electronic technology.

The name Voice Crack appears in the eighties as the title of their 1984 album, which was still credited to their names. That record came out on their own Uhlang Produktion label, and is a live recording where each artist is credited with playing only one instrument: “Geknackte Alltagselektronik,” German for “cracked everyday electronics.” Images of those performances reveal the innards of various electronic appliances and doo-dads laid out on a wooden floor. The audio itself is a tract of whirs, creaks, and sundry abrasives, all reverberating against the surfaces of the room.

Their cracked everyday electronics aesthetic would be carried forward through the eighties and nineties. Their 2001 installation, sound_shifting, was one of their most impressive feats. Using an underwater microphone called a hydrophone, they broadcast the sounds of Venice’s Grand Channel into a nearby cathedral. It was documented in a CD and book.

In the early- to mid-2000s, Möslang and Guhl stopped recording together as Voice Crack, and since then Möslang has been involved with a number of solo exhibitions and recordings. In 2002 he exhibited glass_speaker for the first time. He took a gallery space, and connected contact microphones to the windows, then running the results through loudspeakers inside. As a result, every subtle vibration of the window from the goings-on outside led to big sounds inside. The. In a sense, this was similar to laser microphones, the technology that intelligence agencies use to hear conversations inside a building by measuring the subtle vibrations of a window pane.

By email, Möslang tells me about a unique release he put out in 2004, Capture. It was released on Jason Kahn’s seminal Cut label, known for a number of experimental albums. Möslang knew Kahn for years; in fact, they played together in the Signal Quintet, “In 2004, I was invited to be part of the group show, ‘Nachschub,’ in Feldkirch, Austria, in an old factory building. I developed Capture as a light-sound installation for this occasion.”

“Nachschub” is the German word for “replenishment.” According to the exhibition’s program, which Möslang generously shared with me, the warehouse used for the exhibition was the material depot that supplied parts to the Austrian national railway system, or the ÖBB. When the Feldkirch train station expanded, that warehouse lost is original function, and it was scheduled for demolition. The warehouse’s role was originally to “replenish” materials for the railway; as a result, this exhibition took this concept and extended it to art.

The idea was to create a work that fit inside the room and that had both a visual and acoustic element. “For the visual intensity, I chose 10 fluorescent lamps and placed them on the floor as a cluster. The sound sources, an infrared receiver and a guitar pickup, were placed on the fluorescent lamps. Each of the two different, more or less stable, sounds were processed individually by a parametric equalizer. The sound is always changing.”

The fluorescent lights with associated equipment for sound generation. From the exhibition program, *edition artCore 01.*

Capture is a documentary of the acoustic side of the installation. It’s a classic case of cracking everyday electronics, and fits the exhibition’s theme of “replenishment.” As the program outlines, Möslang himself found the unused fluorescent bulbs in the old factory building, then repurposed them for their sound-generating potential. Those lights were intended to replenish bulbs that had burned out, and here they are replenishing a condemned building with purpose and life.

A close-up shot of the fluorescent lights and pick-up. *From the exhibition program, edition artCore 01.* Thanks to Norbert Möslang for sharing.

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Thanks to Norbert Möslang for the interview and for sharing the exhibition program.

Angus Tarnawsky and Nathan Liow – Artifacts lathe-cut 7″ (In Context Music, 2014)

“The algorithms—which I don’t know much about—are doing their best to arrange the signal in a cohesive order, but it doesn’t always work.”

In 2014, an Australian artist living in New York City named Angus Tarnawsky and a pianist living in Melbourne, Nathan Liow, staged three improvisational performances despite the distance between them. Liow played piano in Australia while Tarnawsky listened via Skype. Tarnawsky then took that Skype transmission, listened for imperfections in the data stream, then looped these back to Liow’s end via FaceTime, where the signal was broadcast live over speakers. The name they used to describe their performances, along with the lathe-cut record that emerged from those shows, was Artifacts—a reference to the digital warps and clips in the virtual call medium.

Tarnawsky caught up with me via Skype to share the story of this unusual release, while Liow weighed in via email. Though Tarnawsky is now living in Toronto, having recently completed his masters degree at the Ontario College of Art & Design, in 2014 he was living in New York City. It was an important place for him to grow artistically, though profoundly different from his upbringing. He grew up in Launceston, a small town on the island of Tasmania, then attended college in Melbourne, where he became engrossed in the improvised music scene. After several summers spent visiting New York and deriving inspiration from the city’s extensive arts scene, he moved there in 2010. Connections he had made with local improvisers helped soften the transition.

While living in New York, Tarnawsky stayed in touch with his friends back home using video chat platforms. As he stayed up late at night to accommodate the difference in time zones, he started to pay special attention to the digital aberrations in the signal he was getting. “In Australia, the internet is pretty unreliable, or at least it was at the time,” he tells me. “I would get such bizarre artifacts, bizarre glitches and sounds.”

He points out that, at the time, many Australian websites had their servers in North America, so even for an Australian to access a local website, their signal would have to cover an impressive distance. On top of this, the internet connection in Australia at the time was also relatively archaic. All this led to glitches in the data stream. “So I’m on these Skype calls, hearing lots of artifacts. I can understand from a technical reason it has to do with the packets of the signal. There’s a certain compression of the signal that is then transported from point A to point B. Occasionally that packet delivery has some issues with it it, where it might load faster or slower. The algorithms—which I don’t know much about—are doing their best to arrange the signal in a cohesive order, but it doesn’t always work.”

At the time, Tarnawsky saw this as an interesting phenomenon, but wasn’t sure what to do with it, “I just kind of put this aside as an interesting thing, a kooky phenomenon.”

One friend that Tarnawsky would Skype with was Nathan Liow, a fellow improviser living in Melbourne. In 2014, Liow mentioned to him that he wanted to put something together for the Melbourne Next Wave festival. Their mutual friend, Rosemary Willink, was one of the curators.

Liow, in touch with me via email, told me a bit about Willink’s concept. “She had been thinking about the idea of the internet and play – she called the exhibition ‘Can we please play the internet?’ Which reminds me of what I used to say as a kid when asking about Playstation, sport or whatever. It brings to mind the idea of the platform—be it a console or a soccer ball or the world wide web—being the fun thing in itself and not just a means for communication or an invisible tool we look over for the sake of our end goal.”

The official program for the exhibition documents the emails that led to Artifacts, but they are rendered in a deliriously warped format.

Tarnawsky recalls discussing the idea via internet call. “He said, do you have any ideas what this might mean? And I said, how about we take this artifact concept that is on my mind, and we try to use it as a core feature of a work?” He emphasizes the conceptual challenge of trying to figure out “a way to use the internet as an instrument.”

Liow remembers the details of that first fateful call. “I first Skyped Angus about the project while I was in transit at Tokyo airport so it’s fitting that we brainstormed the idea literally over the internet. Taking Rosemary’s theme of play, and also with both of us being musicians by trade (piano and Angus drum kit and programming) we were both certain that playing our instruments needed to be a central point in the work whilst being really fun and spontaneous with the internet. The internet was both the thing that facilitated the work, whilst being an obvious participant and an instrument involved in the art making itself.”

Stretching Out a Glitch

After they figured out that they wanted to pull off an in-vivo distance collaboration, the challenge was in execution. Their idea was to have Liow playing the piano live at the festival in Melbourne, with Tarnawsky listening in live via Skype, then sending the distorted signal back to Melbourne via FaceTime to be played over speakers, concurrent with Liow’s playing. Since the ‘artifacts’ were the key focus, they wanted to ensure there would reliably be enough of these digital distortions in the signal. They ran several experiments in which they tried to tax their internet connections. At one point, they ran multiple devices simultaneously in an attempt to eat up as much of the internet connection as possible, and even considered programming something to intentionally overload the system.

In the end, a simple arrangement proved best, since the calls were glitchy enough by nature, and didn’t require any sabotage. Tarnawsky recalls sitting in his apartment with his equipment assembled before him, often up at strange hours due to the time zones. “I would be on a FaceTime call with Nathan, and on a Skype call. The Skype call would be me hearing the sound of the piano coming in to New York.” That call was sent to Tarnawsky via an iPhone poked inside the piano itself, captured via the device’s built-in mic. This arrangement was chosen because they realized, after trying different set-ups involving professional microphones, that the audio compression involved in Skype calls rendered any audiophilic tendencies futile.

“I was using some software to grab moments when a glitch would happen, and maybe loop it or stretch it out. Doing on-the-fly sampling of what Nathan was doing, or maybe trying to eventually build some feedback…. Then that signal was going back to Nathan in the gallery [via FaceTime] and coming out of a speaker.”

Tarnawsky’s rig had multiple components. The Skype call was first filtered through his Roland 101, where he applied a space echo. That signal was then sent to his computer, where it was processed via Mio Console. Then, using a copy of Ableton Live linked with Max MSP, he would sample, alter, and loop the artifacts as they came through. This all had to happen live, since the signal was then sent back to Liow in Melbourne via FaceTime, where it was played live over loudspeakers. The time lag between made the results even more interesting.

Liow, the one charged with performing live in front of an audience, remembers the performances vividly. “The experience being on the piano in the gallery space was quite a disembodied feeling. We set up the audio feed to amplify through two large hi-fi speakers placed on either side of the piano. I was literally swimming in sound, and that provided great impetus for musical instigation and response—though I could not discern who I was playing with and what was deliberate or pure chance. I tried to clear my mind and just react and create in the moment, however it was hard to ignore the fact that a lot of what I was hearing was heavily imbued with what I had played moments prior, hidden amongst layers and layers of lossy audio and feedback loops. Serendipitously, the internet in Australia is so patchy that it really lent itself to surprises in every performance.”

Artifacts was staged as three live performances for the festival, and was also set up as an installation at a gallery, and released as a limited-edition lathe-cut record for In Context Music, the label run by Tarnawsky, which continues, in sporadic form, to this day.

Analogue-Digital Degradation

Artifacts was the fourth release on ICM, and the first to involve Angus himself. The first three releases, which Tarnawsky conceptualized as a trilogy, were releases by other artists who were living in NYC with him at the time. He wanted to do something creative with them, but in lieu of the standard approach of pitching a jam session, he had something else in mind. “They were far more established than I was, and I wanted to know how I could instigate something but not a performance.”

Initially, the goal was to create a series of objects that the artists could use in their performances, for example wooden objects to be played by hand. “For various reasons, it didn’t quite pan out that way, and I discovered lathe-cut records. I figured lathe-cuts would be a way that music could be a way that music could be presented, with each artist needing to think about the medium as really affecting what gets put on the disc.”

The distinct sound qualities of lathe-cut records were intended to interact with the sound contained on the grooves. “I asked the artist to try to present music that would really accentuate that a lathe is a noisy object that almost sounds like it’s been dragged through the dirt. You’ve played it five times and it already sounds like it’s been dragged through the dirt for a decade.

“It’s a really complicated medium. It doesn’t lend itself to clarity for every kind of project.” For Tarnawsky, the question became: “What could we work together to make that would be something that would seem strange, but would be beautiful in this weird lathe-cut world?”

He figures that Artifacts was perfectly suited to In Context Music’s ethic. “There was this kind of backwards-and-forwards, analogue-digital degradation conversation. We took this long-distance collaboration that was all about lo-fi charm, and we were able to put it onto this plastic disc that was a bizarre kind of degradation/compression/alteration of the sound.”

The audio for the record was two 5-minute parts that Tarnawsky felt were suited to the release—especially beautiful excerpts that most closely resembled the sound he and Liow had been striving for. Though he used his own lathe to make some of the ICM releases, he was too busy touring during Artifacts‘ production, so a friend made the 50 copies. He was satisfied with the final outcome and its distinctive, run-through-the-dirt lathe sound. “I felt immediately that it was the perfect medium for it,” he says. “It made Artifacts seem like it came out at the turn of the 20th century. No longer an artifact of the digital era, but an artifact of this way, way back time. Some kind of Berliner disc found in the thrift store racks.”

The piano and speakers, as per the exhibition program.

Today, Tarnawsky retains an enthusiasm for the project, though feels that he would tweak things on his end if were to try it again. He notes that the nature of their set-up could be a bit “out of control” at times, with the sounds he was feeding back to Liow sometimes veering into chaotic, shrill territory— “spiraling out of control,” as he puts it. With more time to practice he says he would try to run things “with more subtlety”—working around the aesthetic he captured in the vinyl release.

Meanwhile, Liow tells me that Artifacts still stands out to him as an achievement. “I’m still really proud of the project. The concept is so visceral and relevant years down the line. And it’s also remarkable how far the technology has come and yet still remains so unrefined. Mostly I’m just proud of the fact that it sounds really beautiful, and it was fun to ‘get together’ and collaborate with Angus on a project that has now found it’s place in multiple gallery spaces and playlists.”

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Thanks to Angus Tarnawsky and Nathan Liow for the interviews. All images courtesy of Angus Tarnawsky unless otherwise specified. Today, Tarnawsky is planning to move to Montreal to complete his PhD in communications at Concordia University.