In stock
CD
Paul DEMARINIS
“Music as a second language”
***2019 repres***
Paul De Marinis : performer-electronics. “Speech melodies extracted from sources as various as language instruction recordings, hypnotists and televangelists are resynthesized and applied to digital musical instruments, becoming eerily beautiful, "the singing of voices more ancient than language.”
15,00€
In stock
2 LP
Paul DEMARINIS
“Songs Without Throats”
Paul DeMarinis is a key figure in the history of electronic music since the 1970s. Collaborator with the likes of Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and David Tudor, DeMarinis is a pioneer in the development of gallery sound installation and digital music technologies. Black Truffle is thrilled to announce the release of a double-LP collection, selected in collaboration with the artist, focussing on DeMarinis’s exploration of synthesized voice and the digital analysis and manipulation of speech sounds. Drawing together tracks dispersed on compilations along with a number of pieces previously unheard in any form, Songs Without Throats offers a revelatory look into DeMarinis’s alternately accessible and uncompromising production between 1978 and 1995.
Opening with a mesmerizing piece from 1978 pairing the voice and tamboura playing of Anne Klingensmith with strings of letters spat out by a Speak n’ Spell to the accompaniment of the randomised melodic patterns of DeMarinis’s homebuilt electronic instrument ‘The Pygmy Gamelan’, the record then dispenses with the live human voice in favour of its recorded and synthetic doubles. We follow DeMarinis’s restless probing of the possibilities of new technologies, from the hacked Speak n’ Spell (which gives us the austere ‘Et Tu, Klaatu’ 1979, another duet with Klingensmith, this time on bowed psaltery, in which the toy’s synthetic voice is stretched into an alien song) through to the use of digital audio samples manipulated with home computer technology in the early 1990s (including a remarkable dream-like collage piece that weaves a rare recording of Stalin’s voice and bird-like electronic twittering derived from its formant-glides into a rich tapestry of samples reflective of the dictator’s musical life).
In between we get a rich sampling of DeMarinis’s signature work with speech melodies – usually unnoticed melodic inflections that lie within speech patterns – which he analyses and translates into synthesized musical accompaniment. These pieces draw on a wide variety of textual and vocal sources, which range from the hilarious to the menacing (‘Cincinatti [1830-1850]’ sets a detailed description of butchering techniques, for example) and an equally broad range of musical conceptions, combining elements as seemingly unlikely as Beethoven’s Opus 31 pianos sonatas and the sounds of 80s synth pop. The results are an extraordinary combination of the alien and the familiar. As DeMarinis himself characterises his work with vocal synthesis, this is ‘a kind of signal that simultaneously carried and obscured meaning and ideation, even as it created a sound world totally alien in esthetic’.
Presented in a deluxe gatefold sleeve with archival images and liner notes by Paul DeMarinis.
Design by Stephen O’Malley. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin
29,50€
Out of stock
CD
Paul DEMARINIS
“The Edison effect-A listener’s companion”
“For this recording, the acclaimed sound artist created theoretically dense work which explores the relationships between recording technologies. Working with the faults of mediums lifetimes apart - the early Wax Cylinder Phonograph and Digital audio suite - he recorded signals imbued with the inherent noise of the opposing mediums. Recording the results back and forth on both technologies ancient and new, this experimental work strives to make music with the hidden textures of history. In short, The Edison Effect is an audio essay of sorts, that seeks to address artistic issues through the exploration and deconstruction of the mediums, and employs the laser beam of digital audio interpreting the analog grooves carved into wax. Aesthetically, this work is a meditative animation of nostalgia, with the idiosyncrasies of the failing mediums providing the texture and tonality to these quiet pensive compositions. Predating the glitch movement where recorded medium deconstruction became the vogue of artist such as Oval and Otomo Yoshihide, the recording has similarities to vinyl deconstruction artist Christian Marclay and Philip Jeck, and comes highly recommended to those intrigued by such explorations.” Sylvie Harrison, All Music Guide
18,00€