bruit jouissance by Delta Brainwave Society

The audio presented here was almost exclusively improvised. The instrumentation varied throughout the videos and album but the tracks contain, in various combinations: bass guitar, generally played through multiple guitar effects pedals; modular synthesizer, routinely itself processing previous audio as well as drawing in shortwave radio signals; ambient digital and cassette tape field recordings of household noise, construction noise, street noise, and transportation noise; and the digital effects and post-processing of Ableton Live and Audacity. The point of using such a broad range was itself to challenge a number of norms. The music draws from both mainstream music traditions/forms (industrial, psychedelic, drone, edm, idm, ambient, et al.) as well as less popular and often academic musics (musique concrete, minimalisism, free improvisation, electroacoustic, and power electronics) and this is reflected in the instrumentation and, if not as obviously, in the final product. There was a conscious choice to use both digital and analog gear rather than pursue any vague notion of purity. And, as reflected in the album cover image above, the vintage cassette recorder (a Realistic CTR-73) that was used on this project broke and only partially functioned in a semi-disassembled form. This, like the choice to use digital and analog gear and to improvise, was an effort to avoid mastery, to avoid control, and to allow the music to make mistakes. Perfect noise would seem an oxymoron, would it not?

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