Humans just can’t help themselves, really. Even when, on the surface, such as on this series of digital bleeps and fizzes, it sounds like random machine noise, the hand of the artist becomes apparent when you consider other elements of music such as structure and dynamic. Avant Whatever founder Ben Byrne has released an EP which could be heard as an extreme end of the idea of machine sound. It is built entirely from digital detritus, like a duet between a skipping, stuttering CD and the bitcrushed internal machinations of a PC. The actual source of the sounds is neither apparent nor spelled out in the documentation and ultimately, the point is irrelevant, though it’s interesting to conjecture. What is apparent is Ben Byrne’s part in the superficially random proceedings.
In many ways, these 5 short tracks remind me of an abstract expressionist painting. As with one of those, the structural elements have been drastically reduced here. Where, say, Kline or Hofmann disregarded any notion of representation of an image, yet still retained the necessary information to create a painting – contrast, composition, tone, colour – so Byrne disregards any notion of creating a song, yet retains the necessary information to create music. This is not just noise. The evidence for this is in the contrasts between tracks. While ‘Part I’ sets up the framework of sounds, ‘Part II’ distills everything to an austere minimalism, a few ghostly electronic whispers and slight, piercing sinewaves occasionally breaking the otherwise silent track. ‘Part III’ at just on 6 minutes, throws the full range of spurts and sputters evoking everything from SID chip gaming, to late 90s glitch, to techno minimalism. While the 5 tracks use the same set of sounds as each other, each is organised by Byrne to own its own character.
One side aspect of the album is the feelings that can be induced by pure digital sound. I’ve not done any research into it at all, so I don’t know if this is uniquely my issue but, where some people are induced to nausea when watching movies filmed with hand-held cameras, pure digital sound has a similar effect on me. Which makes Disposition not just a cerebral exercise but, for me, a physical one as well. At just 18 minutes, though, I’m prepared to go through it. Rather than being an endgame of simplified machine noise, Ben Byrne has done what humans do, creating an evocative suite which works on many layers, questioning the very nature of music but, simultaneously, confirming much of that nature.
Adrian Elmer
