CD – Mego
From the tradition of the Fluxus movement – of which Yasunao Tone was formerly one of the important organizers – the Japanese maestro transcends continuous mutation of matter with forms that are not very crystallized, nor easily encodable. What flows from the grooves of the first long suite (over 30 minutes) is a plethora of arrhythmic pulses; anarchic and very digital, while a stinging continuum is dispensed in the second part (over 22 minutes). Both tracks were produced using purposely damaged audio CDs, from which the corrupted MP3 files were somehow extracted and reformed into new combinations in an extenuating editing. The production derives from the artist’s idea of developing a new software based on the disintegration of MP3 files, a resolution born in collaboration with a team from the New Aesthetics in Computer Music (NACM), a British research project focused precisely on digital sound processing. The result of that research – however – doesn’t seem to have directly produced sufficiently interesting results: what poured out of such a corruption of the MP3 files was the generation of no less than 21 error messages. The messages were then used to automatically assign 21 different lengths to the samples considered. In the end the process became a little hybrid, adopting other forms of complexifying the sounds and operating through different frequency ranges, pushing the noise and experimental envelopes to finally obtain an extreme, though intense and propositional formal value.