I took a break from the writing tonight, and went for a late cup of tea and caterpillar cake in Oxford after work. Its late now, but I have been listening to a 3" CD for the past few days so I think I can just squeeze a quick review in before bed.

Actually I'm not sure it is a 3" CD, it is actually something called a 'fan' CD, which appears to be a three inch disc surrounded by clear plastic that effectively makes it the same size as a 5" disc. The last time I saw one of these was about 1990, when they seemed to be being proposed as the CD medium's answer to the seven inch EP. Its a nice little thing though, with hand drawn decoration around the clear plastic bit. The disc is named Raw Data Studies and is a release by the (I think) New York based young American musician Corey Larkin in a run of a hundred copies on the frequently interesting Copy for your Records label.

From what I can tell, to create the music here, Larkin seems to have taken raw computer data and in some way transformed this into sound, which is then presented here as music. What isn't clear to me is either how you actually go about doing this, and to what degree the resulting sounds have been altered, edited or composed into the two works we have here on this little disc. In his brief notes at the CFYR website Larkin states that his intention with the music was to "exploring possible tensions between methodology and perception, determinacy and indeterminacy.", so suggesting that to at least some degree the sounds heard here were generated, or maybe positioned using processes not under Larkin's control.

So its interesting to think that the systems used to create this music might be somewhat uncommon, and indeed it makes it difficult to review a CD like this without knowing for sure to what degree we are listening to the result of a process, and to what degree compositional decisions made by the composer. If a part sounds great, do we congratulate Larkin for arranging sounds in a particular way, or do we just marvel at what chance systems can throw up at times. I'm inclined to think (with no reason to suspect this other than the music feels composed to some degree) that the second track here, titled Dissipative Music/Mu Law Algorithm has some degree of thought applied to the placement of sounds and the use of silence between them, but I may well also be very wrong. So I find myself only really able to listen to the music as a piece of music left to stand on its own, without knowledge of exactly how it was made getting in the way.

So one thing we do know for sure is that this is harsh, impenetrably severe music. The first of the two tracks here, named Source/ .pdf, which of course suggests that a transformed pdf file provided the sounds we hear, lasts just thirty-six seconds and consists mostly of white noise broken up every so often by flashes of digital chatter. If Larkin arranged any of the sounds in this brief piece I'd be amazed. I suspect that the pdf file was processed using whatever software one uses for this kind of thing, and the piece here is the result. Its a harsh, almost unlistenably alienating sound that shows no compromise at all.

The second track is much longer at fifteen minutes and is essentially a series of equally abrasive digital sounds, white noise, fiercely raw buzzes and brittle, abrupt computer babble. These outbursts though are spaced apart quite wildly, and it certainly feels as if the track was put together in post production somehow, as the way the sounds vary from each other, all raw and confrontational but often leaping about from one sound to the next. Whether this was the case though I have no idea. If the music here was recorded straight from some transformation process without the composer arranging elements to his satisfaction then I'm somewhat stunned. It certainly feels like the sounds were randomly generated, but their positioning the result of composition. Who knows though.

Speaking purely as a fan of nice sounds, this is a hard CD to spend much time with. The bursts of noise are nearly all very aggressive and in places physically hard to listen to. The disc is mastered quite high so the abrasive parts really blast out. This isn't peaceful music, neither is it remotely beautiful. I'm pretty sure that was never the intention though. It is in fact downright ugly and confrontational to the listener. This may well have been the intention... I can't say I'm a fan of how it sounds, its a bit to harsh for my taste, and it isn't a CD I will be playing again all that soon, but its certainly an interesting release, if only because the analysis of how it was made is intriguing. Not exactly bedtime listening then, but a bit of a curio with a tale behind it that probably does need telling.

- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear