Oops, Architect Thomas Mcintosh and sound artist, composer, multi-media person Emmanuel Madan did it again! After the Montreal duo took over an old grain elevator last year, mic-ed it and broadcasted its sounds creating a buzz in the international press and critics, they are back with another by-product of their fervid creative imagination.
"Symphony #1 for Dot Matrix Printers", [The User]'s 3" on Staalplaat recordings, was reviewed by Chain D.L.K.'s contributor Fabrizio "Fa" Cristallo about two years ago (maybe less), but now "Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers" sees the light as a full lenght CD released by Staalplaat in Europe and by Asphodel in North America.
The genius idea behind this project was to feed fourteen old crappy dot-matrix printers (Juki, Epson, Panasonic, Raven, Star Micronics Gemini, Fujitsu and Citizen) some ASCII code that would make them produce different sounds, and coordinate those sounds via custom written ASCII files transmitted through a custom serial protocol to early nineties personal computers orchestrated by a similarly obsolete file server.
The genius of course is also to be found in the political statement of re-appropriating office machinery for purposes of cultural production, or of taking a modern-day ruin and turning it into an instrument of sound, like they did with the above-mentioned "Silophone" project. Not to mention the political statement that their name alone is, remarking how today's technocratic society employs the term 'user' to objectify and 咬educe individuality to an abstract and generic ideal. This reduction is employed wherever abstract rational methodology is applied to situations involving real people. Once this reduction is made, it becomes much easier to treat the faceless, formless 'user' in an inhuman fashion. In our society we employ the impersonal term 'user' to justify the infliction of neon lighting, plastic cutlery and Muzak on a huge majority of our population? How about that?
The CD (at least when bought from Staalplaat, I am not sure about Asphodel) comes inside an old 5-1/4" disc and does not contain any sound sources other than the actual printers, whose execution is partly automated, partly improvised live. The sound is great in its variety and its complexity, unveiling multiple shades of sounds ranging from the classical rhythmical dot-matrix moving head printing (whose movement is intelligently and trustfully recorded with two mics to preserve the great hi-fidelity stereo image, going from one side to the other) that serves as a beat, to the hum of the machines (serving as a background), to other low drones (that I personally have never heard my old printer do), to shorter sounds (acting like punctuating ambient experimental textures and sophisticated musical apparel).
For those of you who just don't get it and want to pretend to forget your narrow-minded stupidity with booty-shaking music, or for those of you who do indeed get it but wouldn't mind some of that booty-shaking stuff yourself, you may wanna check out the LP version of this, as it does come with [the User]'s very own interpretation of booty-shaking edits. Unfortunately I myself haven't had the pleasure to hear their version of booty-shaking, but I trust it to be interesting and challenging enough, and won't comment any further.
These are the new minds that music needs to get out of the stagnating and molding situation. These experiments are the true essence of experimental music. I don't have a problem with noise, but my day would be a lot more exciting if more people would go beyond pointless noise and use their creativity to challenge themselves and others, break boundaries and push the envelope! This is fantastic stuff!