Noise albums sometimes have a small dynamic range, presenting a loud wash of complex sounds, an opaque surface which first resists then rewards efforts to penetrate it. Psychoacoustics has a wide dynamic range, and each of its sounds are clearly distinguishable one from the other. That, and the sheer warmth and even softness of much [...]

The thirtieth and last of the Cinéma pour l’oreille cds is the most peculiar, too. Here’s how it breaks down: thirty seconds of distorted (backwards?) voices over some noise. Silence. Slowly growing rumble; slowly growing louder, slowly adding other sounds, a gritty, gravelly sound early, an unobstrusive wash about three and a [...]

The first sound of Mantra is like that of a motor starting up (motor, not engine), which is only remarkable because nothing else like that ever happens again in the piece. It’s repeated several times in the first few seconds (sounding less and less like that motor, by the way) until overwhelmed [...]

In the world of electroacoustic music, source sounds are often just that, sources. Their original “meanings” have been transmuted into something rich and strange (and playing “guess the source” just distracts from the music). Other times, as in Eric La Casa’s Stones of the Threshold, the sources are obvious. And if that’s [...]