Audio Absorbtion

“Skratchadelia phaseshifts music into a new phonoplastic alloy. Voices are molecularized into chattering, gibbering textures, into globules of pitch that grumble and shift along the spectrum of TechniCS speed, phased and panned by the transformer switch.” Kodwo Eshun

“I’m the pacman, eat everything I can” opening words of Street Sounds Electro Vol. 1

Audio animation consumes other forms of music. Recordings from the concert hall provide an effectively endless supply of raw material from which to create three dimensional diegesis. Once tossed into a world of sound characters, a fragment of traditional music gains new life, recontextualized as within the sounding vision rather than apart from it. The effect heightens exponentially when this raw material is altered into strange new forms—audio events impossible under the old laws of music. The most exciting and poignant results occur when these transformations work like sonic fun mirrors: the original identity is still there, but distorted in shape and persona. Mundane reality warps, folds, disperses. 

When John Oswald coined the term “plunderphonics” he was already operating in a quasi-tradition contributed to by the likes of Stockhausen, Parmegiani, and Carl Stone. Perhaps the earliest masterpiece of audio absorption was “Collage #1 ('Blue Suede')”, by Oswald’s teacher James Tenney. In "Blue Suede", Elvis’ hit song is fragmented into a thousand new forms in a three minute explosion of cursed cartoon sounds—the roars, crashes, and squeals of Boschian Elvis-creatures. At 1:16 these hallucinations cut out and Elvis-proper appears as a gibbering, satanic fool. In the final third he’s joined by the cacophony of mutants in a climax of surrealism and delirium. While Oswald’s works also have a surreal humor, they offer less to the mind's ear as far as audio animation. A major exception is “Dab”—particularly the second half, in which, as described in Retromania, “a strobing swarm of micro-Jacksons billows back and forth across the stereo field”. First phase animation continued to absorb other music, but moments like the one in Stockhausen’s “Hymnen” where performers reciting "La Marseillaise" transform into warbling, deliquescent small animals became increasingly rare.

 

Another school of absorption arose independently in Jamaica during the transitional phase. Delay, in particular, proved capable of transforming any earthly source material into surrealism. The scenes it can conjure up are endlessly varied. Mad Professor’s “Kunta Kinte Dub” turns hand-played drums into a cascade of objects colliding in zero gravity. Whereas the morphing second-suspensions of Scientist’s Heavyweight Dub Champion fire off with the precision force of heat-seeking missiles. As with a boxer’s punches, you never know exactly how or when the attacks will occur. Sometimes the effect dies abruptly, other times it extends, or fades away then surges back into the foreground. The technique of a"developing" echo later became a favorite effect for a handful of second phase animators. In Eon's “Final Warning (Raucous Dub Mix)”, an announcement of a deadly, soon-to-arrive “heat flash” suspends into a burning echo continuum that modulates until its texture no longer resembles the initial voice. (Whatever's happening to the announcer each time he speaks can't be pleasant.) Developing echoes also appear some first phase music. A particularly unsettling instance occurs in Region 3 of “Hymnen”, in which the Swiss national anthem casts off infinite, pitch-fluctuating echo trails that haunt the stereo field for minutes on end, circling it like a kettle of vultures. However, most uses of delay pale in comparison to early dub, lacking its richness and UFO-in-the-countryside contrasts.

The early years of the second phase were a golden age of pop-absorption. The likes of the Latin Rascals, Omar Santana, Carlos Berrios, and Chep Nuñez regularly transformed ordinary songs into audio animation. The reality-bending quality of dub was matched, ironically, by going in the opposite aesthetic direction. Instead of making sounds splinter off, drift away from the musical center—the cut up techniques of mid 80s hip hop evoke a kind of gravitational pull. The original songs are not so much dispersed as taken deeper in, caught up in the kinetic thrashing of the rhythmic engine. Take tracks like Corina's “Out of Control (L'amour East Mix)" and Sa-Fire's “Don’t Break My Heart (Hot Mix)” (which, in a touch of literalism, adds what sounds like a fireball getting hurled around as well). The sense of the voice getting pulled into the motorik flow of the electric body persisted into the 90s. Roger Scruton aptly described one mix of GTO’s “I Wanna Be a Hippy” as “a little human voice trapped somewhere inside . . . churned over and over by the unstoppable machine”. While that repurposing of an old song is comical, the incongruity of an ancient folk song in DJ Seduction’s “Sub Dub” is absurd but serious—a moment of ancestral analepsis in the midst of an interplanetary drag race.

The Art of Noise's “Owner Of A Lonely Heart (Special "Red & Blue" Remix Dance Version)” stands out for the grandeur of its transformations. The opening vocals appear in their basic state several times for reference—but then, suddenly transposed and suspended, morph into a chorus of angels flying through the stereo field. Fragments of the original percussion accented by snippets of voice become violent, solid impacts that slam into the foreground, creating vast reverberations. When absent, these characters are occasionally hinted at by faint glimmers of reverb that emerge in the distance without cause. In short, the cut up, mechanical attack of hip hop and the floating, ricocheting attack of dub are synthesized. Pop music breaks down into sound characters that take flight through the stereo field. 

A more recent absorption phrase occurred at the peripheries of early 2010s internet music. One of the epoch’s masterpieces, Sacred Tapestry's Shader is a journey past the outer limits of ambient and vaporwave that arrives at audio animation by accident. The first half of the release has only hints of diegetic sound (tropical bird calls, a colossal eccojammed voice). For the most part, its ennui and mystery laden virtual sanctuaries are suggested through traditional songcraft. It’s in the last two tracks (constituting the second half of the release) that the aesthetic possibilities of the eccojam are pushed so far that something else materializes before your ears. It’s possible to hear the shimmering, twinned flute in “新たな夢Spirited Child (Color Ocean Sky)” as serving a similar function to the flutes in Bayle’s works like “Mimaméta”—a kind of shamanistic anchor to human scale, dueting with and magically influencing outside forces. Semantically charged fragments of “It’s Your Move” travel in a procession of weightless stumbling, glitching video game objects floating through digital sky. At 7:20, the flute characters move in a slow descent from the uppermost part of the frequency spectrum. This one-off incantation has no immediate effect on its musical surroundings. But subtle atmospheric changes soon begin to set in. In the ending stages, a flood of pressure and light gently envelops the other sound characters; the delirious, uneasy soundworld is engulfed by heavenly energy. "凍傷" begins, like the album’s opening, as a contained time loop. Yet this loop isn’t fully stable, and lurking its temporal peripheries is a particularly vicious sound character somewhere between a big cat’s growl and a jet engine. When at 1:12 the initial loop attenuates down to a single syllable and percussive impact, a sense of forward motion begins to emerge—further strengthened by what sounds like the hiss of pneumatic suspension starting at 2:52. This constantly restarting climb toward cruise control velocity goes on for several moments, apparently in limbo, until a sudden massive surge of reverb around 6:02 announces that the music is arriving somewhere. New fragmentations follow. Around 7:20 the central loop attenuates even further, and spectrally dense reverb rises in the spatial peripheries. A world physics is emerging. The space is cavernous and aquatic, and teeming with activity. Audible traces of the initial looped voice are felt in the watery surroundings. The last sound character to be introduced is a lone recurrent bell chime. Its tolling pierces through your surroundings with an unknown yet unmistakable significance. The culmination of vaporwave’s preoccupation with the subterranean, this trip, like Jeîta, takes you to the oldest places, the underground seas. But Shader seems to reach this territory by miraculous accident. An arrival born out an urge to transgress the horizon.