Artificial Memory Trace – Compo Sites (IHab039-2)
The Impulsive Habitat Netlabel has been leading the way in releasing high quality creative commons field recordings from the very day they started. Picking at random through their catalogue you can place yourself for an afternoon in the mountains of Australia’s north east, in the streets of Helsinki, Finland and into the middle of a downpour in India. The releases often are accompanied by photographs of the geographic sound bites that are recorded and offer not only an audio understanding of the world but a visual one too.
For the 39th release at the label they pulled out all the stops. Artificial Memory Trace releases his hour long field recording piece “Psyites” which is equal part chaotic and hypnotic. I would love to talk more about this piece, but I won’t as it is the second part of this release “Compo Sites” that I am most excited about.
Compo Sites is part two of Impulsive Habitat’s 39th release and is an incredibly unique and dare I say groundbreaking way of releasing sounds into the creative commons world. Artificial Memory Trace has released essentially the source material for his Psyite piece in a series of 22 tracks. The intention behind this methodology is to allow the listener to compose her or his own version of Psyite. To do this one must play the album in any order one chooses from multiple sound sources. Currently as I sit at my desk I have my ipod hooked up to my stereo with the album on shuffle, I have the album on shuffle at my computer desk through Itunes and finally I have it playing straight through the released track list in VLC Media Player. The albums tracks overlap at will and create a stunning, unique sound collage of my own.
So why is this an extremely unique and interesting way to release music? I have two main reasons. Firstly, for me personally it addresses the gripes a lot of people have with digitalized music (I love all formats, but humour me). Often people argue that mp3′s are stale, impersonal and lack an intimacy that say a vinyl format offers. This release took more than just the click of a button for me to set up – I had to choose how to play the album, how many sources I would use, which channels to run the music through etc. The process of hearing the music is involved and I like that. Secondly, It offers a new relation between the listener and the music – the listener now is the arranger, the one who decides what the record will sound like every time they play it and this offers a unique and new listening experience every time.
Currently I have birdsong blissfully chirping behind me and some ambient mechanic sounds and disruptions coming from in front of me. These sounds will ebb and flow throughout the course of the hour that I listen to this release, and will change invariably as I listen to it again and again. If anything, this is a really cool release to experience, luckily the recordings themselves are dynamic and reward the listener/arranger on multiple occasions. I don’t think it is appropriate to add a preview track as they are meant to be over played with each other, so I recommend downloading the release and having a go at it. [AS]
Deep Link To: The Release Page
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