Karlsson teaches music courses at EMS and has some connections with Fylkingen too. He’s a strong advocate for open-source music software, especially SuperCollider, and apparently if you meet him he can’t wait to show you how easy it is to download such apps and start making your own compositions. From what I can make out, Towards A Music for a Large Ensemble made use of such software; and if you buy a download of the release, he’ll gladly share the source code for his composition so that you could do this yourself at home, if so disposed. I think we’re talking about a “virtual orchestra” here; Daniel M Karlsson played and recorded 64 separate musical instruments (and other objects) himself, and, as if to point out the process-heavy nature of the piece, the cover art shows the three-letter save names that he used in his computer as he assembled his materials. The compositional input has been to set these 64 hares running over the hill, using an “algorithmic” method to organise the separate sound files and perhaps let them unspool and collide in varying degrees of randomness.

Although there aren’t 64 separate human beings involved, Karlsson evidently wishes there could be; he loves the idea of a non-hierarchical situation, where 64 players could be in the room all doing their own thing without the need of a conductor, scores, arrangements, or any of that cissy stuff from the 19th century. “A communal sensing and creating all at once … by individual agents with autonomy,” is what he dreams of in his ideal future world of egalitarian creativity. He’d also like to present the listener with ambiguities and dilemmas thereby, inviting us to guess how “real” or authentic these sounds are, how they’re being made, and whether we can form different interpretations of the same source material. To realise that latter aspect, side 2 of the LP contains the same equation as Side 1, just replayed at a different location one month later. I wish there were more musical content, ideas, structure, or even some interesting textures that would make this exercise more worthwhile; where he perceives an endless slew of possibilities, I simply hear a range of very similar overlapping grey tones all swirling together in a gigantic whirlpool, slowly descending into the same vortex of nothingness. From 15 October 2024.

Read his own liner notes to be drawn further into this strange looking-glass world where, by the ineffable Smolders logic, sound itself can be converted into a texture, and we draw more inspiration from the poetry and sculpture of Carl Andre than we do from the Book of Proverbs. When he speaks of a “texture” it’s evident our man is indeed thinking of a fabric much like tweed, twill, or the sort of heavy wool serge used for stage curtains, and hoping he can tame his machines to find a way of “weaving” sound as surely as working on a loom. Jos Smolders is even proposing to colonise the dry and dreary world of the “electroacoustic environment”, considered only fit for habitation by moths and weevils these days, and inject a spurt of life into this arid zone by drawing on samples, ideas, and borrowed rags from the world of dance music, where Techno is king and you can reach transcendence by means of relentless drumbeats and sequenced pulses bashing your frontal lobes. We’ve rarely heard modular synths and granularisation tools put to such devastating use, to say nothing of the way he handles a drum machine, which he does like a professional sniper armed with a precision rifle and a full magazine – easily surpassing all previous efforts made by presidential assassins in the past.

We can situate Smolders in the milieu of other Dutch minimalists and contemporaries, although he’s not as droney as the ultra-prolific Frans de Waard, not as washed-out as the aesthete Rutger Zuydervelt. Roel Meelkop enjoys life as a friendly yellow sphere, but Jos Smolders is a black chisel. A fine piece of precision engineering which ranks almost as highly as that of Ryoji Ikeda; digital abstraction so palpable you can sew it all into a book of samples and exhibit it in a carpet showroom. (02/04/2024)

As the world knows, Polish composer Karkowski flew up to the great dynamo in the sky in 2013, and the release of this record in 2023 is intended to mark the 10-year anniversary of their shared performances in Les Ateliers de Bitche in Nantes. Having said “compassionate”, in fact you may not find much of that Christian virtue in evidence on the actual sounds here, which start out mean and snarly before building up to the full-on “annihilation” mode which so typified the work of the Polish half of the act. Well, perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but most civilians run a mile from the intense bombardment of which Zbigniew Karkowski was capable, and even hardened soldiers admire the tenacity of his stern and steady onslaughts. None of this is to suggest that Double Live Bitche is an unapproachable mortar-attack of jet-propelled shark grenades, nor that its volumic dimensions reach anywhere near the ear-splittage levels you might suspect, but it’s the continuous flow of negative energy that’s passing through their ordinateurs that is so formidable. It just doesn’t stop. Never one to quit once he’s climbed aboard the patrol boat of noise, Karkowski always sees the job through to the end, displaying clear-eyed focus on the task.

While we’ve struggled to assimilate some of Ottavi’s more recent noise-o-magon excesses – one example being the insufferable Bruital Automaton – this one contains just the right amount of toxic death to make it both palatable and useful. I mean useful in a hospital ward where all other treatments have failed and the doctors are desperate enough to try anything. From 12 February 2024.

With the release of Nein Aber Ja (GOTO RECORDS GOTO004) it’s confirmed the duo have been in “hibernation” for most of the last twenty years, but they surfaced in 2022 with releases such as Softbop, Livebop and GMTF Sessions 1-4 (none of which crossed our desk at the time), and reformed an alliance with Tina Frank, the visual side of the Mego operation. This new one is a doozy – a sizzling platter of tiny explosions, with the two creators evidently taking great pleasure in unleashing near-chaos, pulling the rug out from under your back, tearing down buildings and re-assembling them as heavy goods vehicles…I’m re-experiencing a lot of the fun and excitement of new discoveries that Mego used to supply on a regular basis in those heady days of 1999-2000. Impolite, grainy digital noises as thick as sandy beach towels, rubbing paws with aggressive power-beats and – in places – the addition of snarly rapped vocals that make General Magic strong contenders to win at the next annual DAF-impersonators competition to be held in Leipzig (Depeche Mode keep on applying for this event, but they don’t even qualify).

I don’t know if there ever was a “Vienna School” or “Vienna Sound” for this kind of electronic-digital music, but here’s something that marks out its boundaries as something highly distinct from much current laptop-diddling or mixing-desk japery, informed by a strong sense of direction and purpose, and steering a course that avoids lukewarm or over-familiar sounds in favour of snappy, hostile, crocodile bites. (08/12/2023)

Somehow Hurtado’s work never quite falls into place for me, although he’s obviously very intelligent and quite prolific, sometimes appearing as Bazterrak and Azunak, working with Mattin and Miguel A García, and participating in an experimental software programme in the early 2000s, designing his own computer apps for making sound. Today’s item is not entirely unrelated to that, but he did it using SuperCollider rather than a program he wrote himself. Put simply, it’s a “digital feedback system”, which appears to mean that he feeds a variety of source materials into the jaws of his Apple Mac, whereupon the program kicks in and performs its transformative and generative tasks. He likes the way that his “system” will rearrange a pop song and blindly repeat parts of the structure in unpredictable ways (although no evidence of such experiments on this release); he also favours distortion, instability, and combining digital glitch artefacts with pure noise.

Did I mention he did it during the 2020 lockdown? Yes, it’s yet another lockdown album, this one explicitly trying to express something about “feelings of confinement” in sound. Well, he might have succeeded on that account; as with many other similar projects that begin and end inside the computer (the dry, bloodless experiments of Gintas K come to mind, or Marc Spruitt), the music on 20.20 conveys to me the odd impression of being untouched by human hands, floating inside its own hermetic universe, and bearing no relation whatsoever to the outside world, or even to anything recognisable about human existence. And the empty, abstract drones here might recall to mind those endless days and nights when we all drew a strange comfort from being confined to the house, for what seemed like a time of no reprieve. But nothing here lives up the powerful transformation or re-structuring effects that he seems to be promising; it’s mostly rather ordinary electronic music, unsurprising sounds, and compositionally very unsatisfying. Is this the result of trusting the software too much to think for itself, or simply that audio programs and software tools are nowhere near as inventive as we’d like to believe? Or is it that digital feedback is materially deficient and unsuitable for making interesting music? From 17th November 2023.

The piece seems to be some sort of dialogue between computer software and a real instrument, in this case the Turkish saz – a kind of long-necked lute associated with Ottoman classical music which probably has a history going back hundreds of years (an Armenian variant of it, for instance, is known to have been played in the 13th century). The software part of this is CSound, so called because of the programming language it was originally issued in, and it’s a popular open source free program for audio. Moore tells us he came up with a gui for CSound for this particular piece, and also reminds us he’s very familiar with the saz, having loved playing it for about 50 or 60 years. Also did I mention he used the e-bow to create jangly drones from the strings? The home recording made by the COVID-stricken artist was played back in the Waterloo venue, and now here’s an unedited recording of same on today’s CD.

Summa: (A) beautiful music; (B) an imaginative and interesting aural inter-weaving of the ancient and the modern, the acoustic and the digital; (C) given extra poignancy, somehow, by physical absence of Moore from the event. From 2 May 2023.

The follow-up ‘Get Rid Of It’ works over similar territory, using the same sources of sampled punk records, but this time his computer program is more of a “randomiser” thing – short edits, thrown together in a chaotic manner, and spewed out any which way. “A structure that wanders with no direction…but…gets nowhere,” is how he himself describes the piece, and indeed he draws the same pessimistic conclusion about punk music itself – all popular youth culture in fact – suggesting quite strongly that, for all that rebellion and angst and restless spirit, nothing ever really changed and the world is still the same. ‘Get Rid Of It’ is a depressing listen, not just because of the conclusions Hurtado draws, but also because it’s wholly unsatisfying structurally and aurally. None of the passion or power of the original punk records has survived the mangling of his computer, and what we have instead is a charmless exercise in pre-programmed chaos.

In his favour, it’s good to see Hurtado devising his own software and programs for these experiments, and also attempting a composition which has a conceptual unity. As to the former, it’s in the tradition of fellow Basque experimenter Mattin who, between 2007 and 2010, released a number of CDRs in his Free Software series devoted to making music with open-source and homebrew apps.

The story of it is that he improvised “free-form” piano parts while doing a residency at the Banff Centre, accumulating thereby a set of recordings to take home in his suitcase. He enjoyed the task so much that he even went and rescued a piano that had apparently been buried outside in the snow – which may be a common occurrence in Canada for all I know, hence the “frozen piano” credit for musician Mauro Zannoli. What we hear on the record (also released on vinyl) is not these improvisations, but treatment of same after they’ve been fed through an “algorithmic compositional tool”, a form of software which allowed him to generate music automatically, using his source materials and in line with his ideas about customised settings. Doell had no interest, we’re informed, about computers, software, or learning how to develop the tool, and what he likes here is the way the algorithm was making its decisions. This may account for why the results are so hard (for me at any rate) to process as music. Some interesting sounds may surface now and again, and even an intriguing melodic phrase may appear, but the overall drift of this album is pretty much insufferable; whatever musical inspiration there may have been emerging from the hands and brain of Doell when performing at Banff has now been removed, overwritten by a string of ones and noughts.

At a time when many creators are murmuring increasingly about the implications of AI in visual and sound art, here’s one musician who seems to embrace it – or at least one aspect of it – as a force for good. (18/04/2023)

I suppose this disjunctive effect is most evident on the nigh-unlistenable ‘High Shrubs Forming a Thicket’, which presents a barrier of thorns and brambles to this listener with its chaotic spread of marmalade. ‘The Night Whispered and Sang’ is less zany, but simply presents a grey flat vista with its boring sounds, barely worthy of the viewer’s contemplation. Only ‘The Morning Brightened the View’ seems to work on any level, indicating how a ride on public transport can be enhanced with low-key electronic murmuring and bird song fluttering right inside your eyeballs.

Not the greatest statement we’ve heard from this prolific St Petersburg creator; more in the nature of unfinished pages from a sketch book. (March 2023)