Compact discs can be as much a crate-dive as any afternoon trawling for colorful grips at Goodwill or for alternative tones at the sudden Ottoman Empire-era souq that appeared in your neighborhood one mid-July weekend. When it comes to experimental CD-Rs, I’m often in awe of the ability some composers, sound manipulators, and “music travel-agents” traverse eclectic trains of musical thought within a single extended track. An ecopack’d CD-R has fewer confines on track length, though. The format has always been popular with classical music of any form as a way for composers to expound on musical ideas. Noise is by no means “classical,” but it remains just as shocking, fascinating, and process-intensive. Philippe Petit works in direct opposition to anything of a classical technique, in a radical way that’s akin to the French daredevil who shares his name.
For “Slowly the Door Creaks Open…,” the second half of his new album, Ear Me In, Petit focuses on digital manipulation of a healthy sound bank to construct an opus, an exhibition of “processing through Max-MSP patches or GRM Tools mostly relying on the transformation technique of Fourier’s harmonic analysis and spectral resynthesis…. Those electroacoustic behaviors are obviously dealing with minutiae and extreme attention to sound… but still work on sound events creating tension, drama, building up images, a story rather than an acousmatic sound-to-sound approach.” There is even a sense of humor in this horrific wasteland of frequency experiments and audio brain surgery — it’s the shredded sample of a Halloween radio scare-a-thon that gives the track its title, acknowledging how chilling the music can feel at times.
Ear Me In is available now from Bôlt Records in Poland.
• Philippe Petit: https://philippepetitamusicaltravel-agent.bandcamp.com
• Bôlt Records: http://www.boltrecords.pl
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