Richard Kamerman

I Stayed In The Apartment For
Thirty-Two Days Without Leaving

(excerpt; 00:00:00-00:20:00, of 02:49:27)


hand-stamped fan cd-rs
clear poly slim cases, labeled with clear stickers
edition of 100


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Further excerpts of this work have been released as follows
00:20:00-00:30:00 (TBR: Getting Smaller (and gradually indistinct) cassette, Small Faults Publishing)
00:30:00-00:39:30 (Silence=Death compilation, Bored Bear Recordings/BTNR )
00:39:30-01:01:00 (In The Tenth Month Of The Second Year cassette, CFYT01)
01:01:00-01:10:00 (I Hate Music 5 web-compilation
01:10:00-01:20:00 (Owleater 5, HEX compilation)
01:10:00-01:40:00 (dictafawn)
01:50:00-01:55:00 (TBR: Welcome To Our Decayed Factory, Abandonment)
01:55:00-02:00:00 (The Noise From Ridgewood Compilation For The Silent Barn)
02:00:00-02:02:00 (live at Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA, August 20, 2011)
02:02:00-02:04:00 (live at Roup House, Pittsburgh, PA, August 26, 2011)
02:04:00-02:06:00 (live at Smiles For Miles, Dayton, OH, August 27, 2011)
02:06:00-02:13:00 (5ò0â¬Ë+Ã2ÿ3â8õ2: A Compilation of Databending Sounds)
02:13:00-02:15:00 (Gauss PDF)
02:15:00-02:20:00 (Curates Egg)
02:20:00-02:40:00 (provided to Banned Productions upon request for tape series submission, in limbo since Dec. 2011)
02:40:00-02:49:27 (live at Fitness, Brooklyn, NY, December 25, 2012)
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A swift kick in the junk. Less than 20 minutes on a mini CD-R of abrasive as fuck electronic glitch. Like a hundred cats scratching at your microphone while it’s hailing outside. Scratch pop scar city with what sounds like a completely distorted and incomprehensible growling. It could actually be vocals or it might just be an homage to power violence. And it’s fucking relentless. It kicks in immediately and it’s in the red the whole goddamn time. The especially difficult part is the millisecond (and multi-second) pauses dispersed throughout that act like reset buttons. You can’t just zone out to this and ignore the caustic static. He’s a tabula rasa master.

The title of this makes me like to imagine Kamerman going all sorts of insane in his 32 day homebound stint. It’s fuckin raw as hell and beautifully destructive. Plus, it’s only 20 minutes so even those with the most delicate of eardrums don’t have an excuse not to cop this.

Apparently these 20 minutes are an excerpt from a 2+ hour long piece Kamerman made that will be released in differing formats on varying labels. A very strange approach but I kinda dig it.


- Justin Snow, Anti-Gravity Bunny


The proud boast of Richard Kamerman is I Stayed in the Apartment for Thirty-Two Days without Leaving (COPY FOR YOUR RECORDS CFYRF02). To express the degrees of cabin fever, loneliness and internalised urban angst that transpired across his frame, he delivers himself of precisely twenty minutes of digital white-noise rubble on this special 3″ CDR printed with artwork on the non-data area, a presentation which some refer to as the MiniMax format. None but the brave will survive to the end of this extreme, heavily-distorted session of aural torture, a near-blank wall of non-information which is extremely unpleasant, and wherein it’s possible almost instantly to start discerning imaginary voices, music, and other streams of data that simply are not there. If twenty minutes of this brutalism isn’t enough for you, then you’ll be pleased to learn that further extracts from this long-form work (nearly three hours in toto) have been released in other formats on other micro-labels, with further portions planned for the future. A grisly, testing piece of work with no concessions made whatsoever for your listening enjoyment; never has the simple act of staying indoors seemed so desolate, so unappealing.

- Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector


Tonight a very loud, harsh CD by Richard Kamerman. Now, the last time I wrote or said something derogatory about noise music within Richard K’s earshot his next CD release got named Open your windows and play this loudly (You’re exempt Mr Pinnell), or something similar to that. Given that clearly my musical tastes tend to lean away from the noisy end of things, and given that Richard didn’t send me this disc, I bought it, knowing it would be at the louder end of the spectrum- it would be somewhat disingenuous for me to write a bad review of it here now. Instead I will attempt to write something about my experiences with listening to the disc, which, with a bit of luck will highlight my own failings rather than any the disc might hold.

The release in question is the second in the “Fan” series on Richard’s Copy for your Records label, a solo by Kamerman named, intriguingly; I stayed in the apartment for thirty-two days without leaving. I reviewed the first disc in this series, a piece by Corey Larkin a little while back here. A Fan CDr seems to be a 3″ disc set inside a clear, 5″ diameter piece of plastic, that in the case of this series has been hand stamped. The disc contains precisely twenty minutes of music, in fact the first twenty minutes excerpted from a long piece that apparently lasts nearly three hours. Further excerpts have then been released on various other compilation albums and the like. The music is apparently created from the sound of computer glitching. Its a rough, crunchy stream of distortion, similar to the sound we hear when on a mobile phone in high winds, a jagged edged blur of white noise slowed down slightly with the volume turned up. I imagine if you attached a contact mic to a roll of cellotape and then unwound it steadily for twenty minutes, stopping abruptly every so often it may sound something like this.

So anyone that reads these pages regularly might guess that this CD isn’t really my cup of tea, but I wanted to try and understand why I find this kind of music so difficult to connect to. In general I enjoy music that pushes at the edges. I can remain completely focused during very long, very quiet music, and am happy working out the puzzles posed by some of the most highly conceptual music around today. So what is it about very loud music that I struggle with? Subconsciously there are a number of things that probably get in the way. I generally speaking have always hated the imagery that is often associated with noise, some of it borrowed from the industrial music scenes I knew as a younger man. The aggressive imagery and /or attempt to shock that is often seen in relation to this end of music has always annoyed me a great deal, but here there is none of that to be found, and the curious title, (perhaps borrowed from an Annette Krebs anecdote?!) contains no allusions to pain or suffering, humorous or otherwise. I’ve never been much of a fan of music that relies so heavily on adrenalin either, but while there is a severely intense feel to this music it doesn’t feel like it is dripping in testosterone.

In fact this disc from Kamerman is a highly detailed dense stream of computerised distortion that continually thickens and thins, with new elements added and subtracted, shifting and reshaping itself continually, and frequently crashing into sudden glitching silences for momentary seconds, though one silent chasm a little more than half way into the disc manages to stay silent for a good five or six seconds, which end sup being a strange, pregnant few moments as we wait for the assault to restart. The actual sounds are quite interesting. I’m not sure precisely how they are made, whether we are hearing the mechanical, working parts of the computer here or if the raging sounds are computer generated. I also don’t know if the twenty minutes we hear here are directly ‘played’ by Kamerman or if we are hearing some kind of haphazard discovery of malfunctioning software, but this probably doesn’t matter.

So I quite like the sounds, and I like the sudden gaps in the barrage very enticing. I took little from the actual act of listening though, primarily because of the volume levels. Once I did that sacriligieous thing and turned the volume right down however I found the music easier to follow. The problem though, is this just isn’t how the composer intended for the music to be heard. Ultimately I think I just need to focus carefully and pay attention to the details of music, and listening to the driving, pummelling wall of sound here saw me struggle to obtain the usual sensation of close contact with the music. It feels like a barrier is being thrown up between myself and the material that nmakes up the music. Listening carefully at volume, as I have tried to do several times this evening feels a stressful and agitated experience. This music doesn’t feel welcoming.

Perhaps then it isn’t necessarily meant to  be. Perhaps the sensation of disorientation that comes with any attempted close appraisal of this music is deliberate. Perhaps the composer doesn’t want the music to be pulled apart, each section dissected, with some pretentiously floral description applied to each segment. Maybe the music is meant to be experienced partly physically. Maybe it is meant to disorientate, maybe it isn’t meant to be aesthetically appealing. Just because of who it is that has released this disc, a musician that has made a lot of much quieter, often very good music I suspect there is plenty here of value that I, for all my failings just cannot connect with. Maybe I am just hardwired to struggle with noise music, (this sounds like a joke but I’m deadly serious) perhaps I will never understand how a piece of detailed music becomes better with the volume turned up so high it distorts what is there int he first place. The truth is, many people will enjoy this music greatly, and as I have suggested this noisier end of the music isn’t the side of Richard Kamerman’s multi-faceted musical personality I enjoy the most, but his work elsewhere will keep me investigating this other end of the spectrum each time he releases something new.


- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear