Thinking about the kode9 excerpt, psychoacoustics and recent rantings about cannibalism, I dug up this old piece that I made myself a few years ago, during a static period in my musicmaking and life in general. Nary a beat in sight here. Probably won't appeal to the vast majority of people.

At the time I was doing a lot of late-night listening to microstoria, number stations and EVP recordings. I was also completely fascinated with the nocturnal doings of snow ploughs. Ottawa has a uniquely efficient snow-removal system so, during bouts of insomnia, I became captivated by these dinosaur-like machines flooding the dark streets with their blue beacon-lights while carving grids in the blanket of whiteness. If this recording is representative of anything at all (I wouldn't count on it), it might be the seismic rumbles, indicator sirens and jostling steel of the ploughs.

The cannibal part comes from the fact that the piece is based on one sample from an odd source - the source code of Macromedia's Dreamweaver software (a pirated copy no less). I opened the program as raw audio data in SonicWorx cropped all but a tiny bit with nice harmonics amongst all the noise (the information was pretty dense, which I take to represent efficient coding. would be funny to test against a microsoft product). It was about ten seconds long. I time-stretched it to seven minutes, pitch-shifted it heavily and 'played' it back 'live' with a bit of jog-wheel manipulation and EQ-play.

mp3 - untitled