freeform goodness

Various Artists - Decay Product [✯✯✯✯✯]

I recently took the opportunity to re-rip one of my all-time favorite recordings, 1997’s Decay Product by Various Artists (the tongue-in-cheek alias of Berlin producer Thorsten Profrock).

It’s one of the most sonically distinctive recordings I own. It’s very much a part of the so-called “Berlin school” of dub-influenced techno that was so very prominent in the mid-1990’s, but, even among those recordings, it’s distinctive. My friend Matt MacQueen came up with one of my favorite descriptions of the Berlin sound — it’s like techno with a layer of “line-noise” over the top. In Various Artists’ case, the “line-noise” is fully integrated into the very fiber of the music. The distortion isn’t just an effect: it is the music. On tracks like “No. 6 (debit)” and “Erode”, there are melodies, strong melodies, even, that aren’t explicitly contained in the tracks themselves, rather, they’re implied by the shape of the noise around the missing notes. Some tracks, like “No. 3 (credit)”, make the melodies more explicit, but we’re a million miles away from hooks and choruses here.

A once overheard a DJ in RecordTime’s dance room talking about another Berlin-school recording: “you just keep wanting to turn in up louder.” I know this excuse has been used for decades as people who just wanted to blast their stereos, but the details of this music really do emerge when it’s played back at maximal volume. I love to throw it in the car stereo and just let it blow past my face.

I’ve never been really satisfied with the sound of any of MP3 encodings I’ve ever made of it. It always seemed to me that the lossy algorithms developed to deal with things like human voices, guitar chords, french horns, and violins completely fall apart when asked to deal with, say, a delicately modulated sigh of tuned pink noise. This time I decided to encode it losslessly, and it does sound fantastic, with the obvious trade-off of disk space.

:: Dave Walker 10:51 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

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