DAT – BIN

There are only twenty-five copies of this project by Jonas Olesen. Built with a Function Generator and an analogue recorder Panasonic SV 3800 DAT it is the result of a fifteen-minute sound continuum using a physically corrupted BASF master tape. The intentions behind the project, and particularly its release on obsolete media, can be understood as a critical comment on the instant gratification of the digital realm. The Danish experimenter is not new to this kind of approach and is able to combine synthetic sounds and glitches with unusual instrumentation, such as different kinds of electromagnetic pickups, pocket computers and other devices. Olesen currently works and teaches electronic music history at Dansk Institut for Elektronisk Musik (DIEM), in Aarhus, as coordinator of the Nordic Sound Art program. His academic background implies a rigorous approach and this is supported by work released under the moniker Batch Totem – an album released on the near-obsolete floppy disk format, which managed to cram 74 minutes of music into 1.44 Mb of space. In that case amplitude and low bitrates produced “ghost frequencies” according to the Nyquist theorem, which states that very high frequencies and white noise can occur at very low bitrates. Here the process is perhaps more simple and direct but the work retains a strong poetic, fluent in its minimalist suggestions and the cryptic sounds produced by generating different types of electrical waveforms over a wide range of frequencies. Each of the DAT cassettes – technology that formed a coexistence between analogue and digital – are unique, overturning the ‘identical clone’ feature typical of a format that is now defunct for the general public but still used by major international broadcasters.

 

Jonas Olesen: TEST – Sweet Metro [Synthetic Formant Enhancement]

 

Jonas Olesen ‎– {Intern Motor} {Pcm.Dec.}