UPIC WARP TRACKS
A follow-up to last year's dazzling Blackest Ever Black album, this three-track EP provides a very welcome second helping of the duo's experiments with Iannis Xenakis' UPIC system, a means of computer composition facilitating the translation of visual data into auditory information. UPIC not only allows the user to draw music, it allows images to be 'sampled' and reinterpreted as waveforms. The finer points of all this are likely to remain something of a mystery to anyone who hasn't actually used the system (i.e. virtually everyone), but it's certainly easy enough to appreciate the depth and complexity of the music that comes out at the end of the process. As with Blackest Ever Black, the pieces collected here are resolutely abstract, never taking on any sort of easily digestible, linear form, and while some might be inclined to discount these pieces as mere noise there's so much more going on - so much crisp, beautiful detail. If it's still possible to hear any new sounds in music (in an age when it seems all information ever gathered is all around us, all the time) you might just find one or two of them here. It's particularly satisfying to find Warp still supporting the frontline of electronic music; this is experimental sound at its most exciting, and for that matter, most experimental. Very highly recommended.
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A follow-up to last year's dazzling Blackest Ever Black album, this three-track EP provides a very welcome second helping of the duo's experiments with Iannis Xenakis' UPIC system, a means of computer composition facilitating the translation of visual data into auditory information. UPIC not only allows the user to draw music, it allows images to be 'sampled' and reinterpreted as waveforms. The finer points of all this are likely to remain something of a mystery to anyone who hasn't actually used the system (i.e. virtually everyone), but it's certainly easy enough to appreciate the depth and complexity of the music that comes out at the end of the process. As with Blackest Ever Black, the pieces collected here are resolutely abstract, never taking on any sort of easily digestible, linear form, and while some might be inclined to discount these pieces as mere noise there's so much more going on - so much crisp, beautiful detail. If it's still possible to hear any new sounds in music (in an age when it seems all information ever gathered is all around us, all the time) you might just find one or two of them here. It's particularly satisfying to find Warp still supporting the frontline of electronic music; this is experimental sound at its most exciting, and for that matter, most experimental. Very highly recommended.
A follow-up to last year's dazzling Blackest Ever Black album, this three-track EP provides a very welcome second helping of the duo's experiments with Iannis Xenakis' UPIC system, a means of computer composition facilitating the translation of visual data into auditory information. UPIC not only allows the user to draw music, it allows images to be 'sampled' and reinterpreted as waveforms. The finer points of all this are likely to remain something of a mystery to anyone who hasn't actually used the system (i.e. virtually everyone), but it's certainly easy enough to appreciate the depth and complexity of the music that comes out at the end of the process. As with Blackest Ever Black, the pieces collected here are resolutely abstract, never taking on any sort of easily digestible, linear form, and while some might be inclined to discount these pieces as mere noise there's so much more going on - so much crisp, beautiful detail. If it's still possible to hear any new sounds in music (in an age when it seems all information ever gathered is all around us, all the time) you might just find one or two of them here. It's particularly satisfying to find Warp still supporting the frontline of electronic music; this is experimental sound at its most exciting, and for that matter, most experimental. Very highly recommended.
A follow-up to last year's dazzling Blackest Ever Black album, this three-track EP provides a very welcome second helping of the duo's experiments with Iannis Xenakis' UPIC system, a means of computer composition facilitating the translation of visual data into auditory information. UPIC not only allows the user to draw music, it allows images to be 'sampled' and reinterpreted as waveforms. The finer points of all this are likely to remain something of a mystery to anyone who hasn't actually used the system (i.e. virtually everyone), but it's certainly easy enough to appreciate the depth and complexity of the music that comes out at the end of the process. As with Blackest Ever Black, the pieces collected here are resolutely abstract, never taking on any sort of easily digestible, linear form, and while some might be inclined to discount these pieces as mere noise there's so much more going on - so much crisp, beautiful detail. If it's still possible to hear any new sounds in music (in an age when it seems all information ever gathered is all around us, all the time) you might just find one or two of them here. It's particularly satisfying to find Warp still supporting the frontline of electronic music; this is experimental sound at its most exciting, and for that matter, most experimental. Very highly recommended.