From Julien Ottavi – maybe – comes the record Extended Stereo (FibrrRecords fibrr023) by Radio Noise Collective, one of those projects that strives for anonymity as it attempts to subvert everything we know and hold dear in our shared assumptions about society and its infrastructure, the building blocks that hold together.
In this instance the Collective are launching their assault against the airwaves, tuning into radio waves by use of “hacking devices”, as they would have it…the point of this work, here expressed as two long and near-unlistenable sessions of chaotic noise, is not so much the technology involved, but the investigation of chance relations and unexpected events, that might be taking place in this huge cloud of information passing over the air. In that aspect, it’s very close to another Ottavi project called the Great International Audio Streaming Orchestra, which misused the internet in various naughty ways as a platform for their ideas and their noise. Ottavi and crew are convinced that there exists “invisible fluidity within a noise-cloud”, a cloud which it is their task to interpret, and through the shared collective effort of these bodies to arrive at “decoding and recording the universe in one movement”. High ambitions for sure, but I do like the idea of efficiently performing two major tasks at the same time, and anything we can do to make sense of the morass of data that surrounds us at this present time – whether that be in digital or radio-wave form – would be welcome.
So far you can probably tell we’re quite some distance from the conventional idea of “playing music”, or even the production of table noise, and entering a strange and rare zone where the very act of tuning in is taken as an opportunity to make a record of what you’re doing as you go along, logging every step, perhaps in the hopes that an audience of consumers will process it later on. Well, I’m all for this – if only the results on the disc were a bit more useable at some practical level. The ‘Circuit Krusher’ track is nigh-on insufferable – a chaotic jumble of signals which soon coagulate into an enormous bowl of poison, with very little in the way of conventional listening pleasure to help us along the way. Where’s the decoding, I ask – searching in vain for some form of mediation that’s explaining where we are and what this might mean. Radio Noise Collective seem content to just let the sonic debris pile high and the devil take the hindmost.
Somewhat more approachable though, is the ‘Accelerum Megahertz’ track, which leads us away from the bitter, harsh tones, and presents huge swathes of between-station tunings (probably several of them at once), creating a tasty mix of spoken-word and music fragments in among the multi-verse of alien white noise. It feels like high winds – I’m being buffeted by the radio waves like a kite, or a helpless plastic bag in a tornado. At least on this cut one does have the sense that human beings are twiddling their knobs and moving their dials somewhere, so it’s not the completely automated process that we heard on the record by Harsh Noise Consortium (another Ottavi project) from Jan 2022. Me poor man, I’m still not sure what this jumble of information is telling me about the world, or why it matters; nor is it clear why the best way to access this information is through a large number of detuned radio sets. It’s like a large extended metaphor for unreliable communications, the fragility of meaning, the dangers of misunderstanding. From 21 March 2023.