Superfluous noises for transilient living.
| Show title | Description | Reviews |
|---|---|---|
| Truth and Method | We're moving! After many years in Pittsburgh, we're disassembling the studio and moving to South County, Rhode Island. We hope to be back in action relatively soon. Until then, here's one for the road. | 0 |
| Elsewhere f/Imago Meccano | One more in the vein of collaboration and instrumentation not usually found in experimental electronica. Here, we have a joint venture with Imago Meccano on electronics and H_tecH on shortwave as well as, believe it or not, ukuleles. We dig the sound, and may pick up ukes again in the future. Catch more of Imago Meccano at: http://www.myspace.com/imagomeccano. | 0 |
| Climbing the Remainder f/Antonio deBraga | Here is another collaborative track, this time featuring Antonio de Braga. Mr. de Braga is a very interesting artist as he is a drummer which, as far as we can see/hear, is rare among experimental artists. To be sure, it's the first time you've heard live drumming here. You can listen to more of his work at: http://www.myspace.com/antonidebraga | 0 |
| Grain of the Voice f/BusKerDroiD | Among the exciting things happening with us, there is collaboration. H_tecH recently worked with BuskerDroiD to complete a 4 song EP. Here is the opening track of the first BusKerDroiD vs. HermeneutecH release, titled _Hiss’s_. This is the first time we’ve presented a collaboration on this podcast, but we hope to do more in the future. If you're interested, let us know through http://www.myspace.com/hermeneutech. As for the BKDD vs. H_tecH EP, you can hear the rest at: http://www.myspace.com/buskerdroid. | 0 |
| Rawdio 1 | There are lots of exciting things going on at H_tecH HQ at the moment, and most of them involve our latest fascination with radio noises. Here we have a piece comprised solely of our raw material for these sounds. We condensed nearly 2 hours of DX’ing into less than 10 minutes of layered, but otherwise raw, shortwave. To be sure, these are the sources for much of our recent and soon-to-come works. So, if you want a project, listen close and you might be able to identify some of our samples within their original context…like _Where’s Waldo_ with audio. | 0 |
| Man to the Mon | A big stack of radio sounds here, still big on the distortion, brings a hard industrial vibe with a dubby bass that may conjure Jah Wobble. | 0 |
| Lack Strap | Distortion is fun. Lots of distortion is lots of fun. But how do you clearly present distortion as such? These things keep us up at night. Lots of little noises from radio and field make up the base of this track, which should please those who prefer their noise with beat-driven support, and several layers of distortive treatments take the sampled, worldly noises into a more aggressive register than usual (for us). | 0 |
| Speaker on Metal Box Action 2 | Before we get too far ahead of ourselves... Some have asked if there is a Part 2 to "Speaker on Metal Box Action 1." The answer is yes. Here you go. | 0 |
| Fanfare Addenda | We've just completed a full-length album, more details on that soon. In the meantime, this means we have lots of material that didn't make the album but, we feel, still has some merit. For example, this ditty which was just a bit too tame compared to the rest of the album tracks. | 0 |
| Dumpster Bumping Block Captain | After some hibernating, we're awake and ready to roar. While we slept, some new toys came. Our favorite? A shortwave radio. | 0 |
| Speaker on Metal Box Action 1 | Due to technical difficulties, not the good kind that make noise but the bad kind that impose silence, we have been off the virtual airwaves for a number months. We are close to resolving these problems and returning to our more regular ‘casts. Here for your enjoyment is a recording from a performance, or “live action” as groups in our vein often call such things. It was made with a single microphone that was also fed back through a speaker on a big metal box. You can hear us searching for the best placement and levels for feedback control: headphone listeners beware. | 0 |
| Heliotropic Figuration | This is the first of anything like a remix we’ve presented to you. After thinking about the feedbacky qualities of the plumbing sounds we caught, we couldn’t resist finding out how it would sound through guitar distortion/amplification. As it turned out, the result is a lot like those distorted guitar drone acts that are all the rage. | 0 |
| #1 Fan | HVAC can be a serious thorn in the side of recordists. But these systems provide the backdrop for most of our present soundscape. This is a collage of fans, sounding something like a mechanical ocean (at least until the end, when a wildly wobbling ceiling fan bucked its contact mic). | 0 |
| Offal Sirens | The material for this 'cast comes from one of the most supremely bizarre and unique sonic phenomena we have ever encountered: singing plumbing! We were privileged enough to have the opportunity to set our apparatus upon a building's "faulty" plumbing which, for some unknown reason, often produces loud, distinct, ringing pitches—sounding somewhere between electric guitar feedback and a shakuhachi. As if the surprisingly musical tone weren't enough of a surprise, the sounds alternate in pairs that are a fairly consistent interval apart AND the whole thing even modulates from time to time producing very tense...um, tensions. Sadly, mere stereophony cannot convey the experience of being with the sounds in the raw: imagine these whistling tones in an uncanny architectural surround-sound, emanating from the sinks and toilets, and from inside the walls and floors too. Sometimes it goes on for seconds, sometimes it goes for up to an hour. We're no plumbers, we have no idea what the cause could be (and we're certainly not going to be the ones to try to stop it from happening, anyway). But we are good enough tinkerers to be able to whip-up some contact mics from parts at the local Retro-Shack in order to bring you a mosaic of noises from the spookiest plumbing we've ever heard. | 0 |
| Fencing Pig Iron | Construction sites are favorite sampling sites, and with good reason. Banging, clanging, buzzing, humming, scraping, thudding, shouting: they've really got it all. We pulled some surprisingly mellow sounds out of the mostly harsh, percussive environment, yet we also couldn't resist the urge to employ some of the patterns of house music using these sounds of house construction. | 0 |
| Officious Pedants | More sound-sculpting of field recordings… It's always tough to say whether the work is more interesting when the source material is identified or when it's a mystery. We'll leave you with the mystery for now. | 0 |
| Antedessicantor | We’re overrun with field recordings and other audio ephemera which, theoretically, we’re stockpiling for use with our regular synthesizer works but, realistically, we know we’ll never use everything. So, in an effort to get out from under this heap (and to share with you some of the great sounds we might not otherwise get around to featuring) this ‘cast marks the beginning of a series using NO synthesizers. The world of everyday noises promises to be more bizarre than anything electronics have produced. | 0 |
| Waste Management Solutions | One great thing about warmer weather is being able to throw open the windows for all those wonderful urban sounds, like diesel engines, air brakes, hazard flashers... What's not to love about garbage day? | 0 |
| Dermal Thermostatic | Our record player broke. Mor specifically, the battered old nub of a stylus is no more. It was once perfectly worn-in to the point where it could barely catch a groove in some of the older vinyl, making it skip and glide across tracks, generating its own musique concrete while accenuating the rudest hissing and crackling. But this hard living led to an early demise. As requiem for that old stylus, we bring out some synthesized hisses, crackles, pops, clicks, and other vinylisms gone electro. | 0 |
| Spring Broken | For a certain segment of the population, this time marks the beginning or ending of Spring Break. In the spirit of tropical retreat, H_tecH lays out dubby bass sines and minimal percussion with some (at times) uncanny realism (thank you, resonant filters). So pleased were we with the percussion that we twisted the filters and delay returns into wobbly Neubauten-esque two-step. | 0 |
| Murfis Grenadier | Having noticed a foreign scratching in the walls, we recalled someone researching the effects of white noise on rats and finding that it had "negative effects." H_tecH piles on the white noise generators here to exorcise whatever rodents may be trespassing. Of course, we later came to realize that "negative" is not at all clear. For all we know, the noise whips rats into a hyper-aggressive human-eating horde...which would be very negative indeed. | 0 |
| Mediate Cardiac Auscultation | Someone came by with a stethoscope this week. It would be the best contact mic ever, if only we could figure how to electrify it. Though we fell short of featuring actual sounds of the body, we were reminded of the pivotal role of mediate auscultation in aural explorations of inner space. In addition to the dominant sonic icon of the heartbeat, there's a lot of fantastic, irregular noises happening. Cheers to the body and all its squishy mystery. | 1 |
| Sum Any Nonce Once Anonymous | Amidst throbbing washes of noise—homage to Merzbow's Merzbuddah phase—come patterns hinting of...blues? We don't know what to make of it either. As electronicists, we know that it's usually better to collaborate with ghosts in the machine. But we were as surprised as the rest by what was revealed when the LFO's spun down a little. | 0 |
| Snow Blind | Recorded during the height of a blizzard, HermeneutecH lost power three times during the 'cast. Regardless, one of the marvelous things about recording analog synths with a DAW is that, when the power goes out, the synths don't immediately fall silent, they literally croak as the power drains; meanwhile, the recorder stays on to capture it all. But let us not dwell on death and dying today. Get romantic, put on some H_tecH and tell your radioactive mutant lover how you really feel. | 0 |
| Astro-Cattle for Space-Cowboys | With Ennio Morricone receiving honor, HermeneutecH pays homage to the king of Spaghetti Western soundtracks. Spectral whistling wafts on waves of reverb as mimetic FM cattle bells clang in loose groupings. Delay-returns wrangle the lot into rhythmic order every now and again, bringing some order to the electronic frontier. | 0 |
| Brindle Antenna | Founded upon the deconstruction of a typically dense D'n'B bass patch, and adding a variably divided pulse to the original, extremely slowed-down timbre. Channeling into resonant filters, the harmonic partials take on the character of organ music until the track disintegrates into the low rumblings from the last gasps of the decimated bass tone. Healthy doses of triangle waves ride on top as a French psychoanalyst and Death Metal serve to modulate glitch elements and punctuate the mix. | 0 |
| Flies on Shift | HermeneutecH employs imaginative patch designs and real-time analog synth manipulations together with found sound to create seemingly living aural landscape that evolve both techno-organically as well as through user control. | 0 |
