Marinos Koutsomichalis - Malfunctions (Agxivatein, 2010)

Marinos Koutsomichalis - Untitled 2


I'm thinking this new Agxivatein label might be on to something... They put out that user-manipulated album by Bozkurt, and now they got Marinos Koutsomichalis' Malfunctions, which also has a bit of a surprise element.

I don't make music. Never have, probably never will. But from what I'm told, it's not an easy process. Lots of shit can go wrong, equipment breaks, strange feedback coming from unknown places, the whole Murphy's Law thing. Koutsomichalis laughs in Murphy's face. Malfunctions is an album comprised entirely of those unwanted sounds. The mistakes that you seek to eliminate and destroy. Marinos purposefully manufactured those random artifacts and fine tuned them, resulting in a brilliant electronic noise album.

If I hadn't been told the sound sources on Malfunctions were "mistakes," I wouldn't know. I mean, come on, it is a noise record. That being said, this is some seriously fantastic noise. Huge harsh squalls of static folding over itself, hidden blips on the radar, power line hum, bug zappers, there's even an entire track that sounds like Airsoft machine guns blasting from single shot to full-auto.

Not all of the songs ramp up to full blown body crushing walls of sound, some are sparse glitchy skipping hard drives, but the ones that do are absolutely beautiful. So many fucking layers of astounding chaos. Honestly, my speakers can't go loud enough when I listen to Malfunctions. Cranked all the way up, I feel my bones vibrating to dust and I still want more. This album works great as a concept, but throw that idea out with your hearing, fucking turn it UP and you just have one of the best noise albums of the year.

Batuhan Bozkurt - Laconicism (Agxivatein, 2010)

This is one of the coolest things ever. This is not a regular record. Batuhan Bozkurt made software, which in turn makes music, and your job is to fuck with it and make your own sounds, in essence creating a collaboration between you and Bozkurt. The general idea he started with was that music doesn't need to be "locked to definite micro or macro event sequences in time." He believed that when that happened, there was a "transmission loss between the composer and listener" and Laconicism is his means of eliminating that "transmission loss."

The software "provides a recipe for computers to generate sounds utilizing various sound synthesis techniques on the fly." Basically, totally fucked electronic noises that you can make sound like a swarm of bees, a glitchy blip orgy, a crumbling wall of static, or a minimal 20 BPM snooze fest. It's entirely up to you. There are 18 "songs" on Laconicism, each with a certain number of slider bars which are always set at specific levels when the "song" starts. Moving the sliders up and down change various aspects of the sound in a "circuit bending fashion." There's even a "Random" button that throws the sliders into random positions if you're feeling lazy/adventurous.

This is a piece that requires full attention. You can have fun and create all you want but as soon as you stop, the program continues playing the same loop you set it at until you come back and change it. This isn't necessarily bad, though, as some of the "songs" have really interesting sounds & patterns. But to hear another "song" you need to manually cycle to the next set or go fuck around some more.

Laconicism is easily the most unusual piece of music I have in my collection. It takes user accountability and the static/dynamic dichotomy to levels I've only ever seen in museums or galleries. And going along with the whole audience manipulation theme, this is a CC licensed program so you can download it for free from Bozkurt's site, or you can spend a couple bucks and get a physical disc in the mail from Agxivatein.

And I know I did a terrible job of explaining how this works, so watch this video and be persuaded by Laconicism's awesomeness.