Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers

I just got back from wandering around outside in the sun (I may be feeling a bit sick, but I didn’t want to miss out on a nice, warm spring day!) when I got a quick heads-up from Phil…

Phil: Have I got some weird shit for you, if you have a moment.
Phil: Pop open iTunes, go to the iTMS, and do a search for “Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers“
Phil: I’ve heard of music using “found sounds” but this is ridiculous ;)

The album is twelve tracks long, and they’re all exactly what you might expect from a project with a name like this: ‘songs’ constructed using the sounds from a working dot matrix printer.

As it turns out, the Symphony is a music/art project by The User, commissioned by the Fondation Daniel Langlois and Hull Time Based Arts, and it sounds like something I’d love to see in person.

Dot matrix printers are thus turned into musical ‘instruments’, while a computer network system, typical of a contemporary office, is employed as the ‘orchestra’ used to play them. The orchestra is ‘conducted’ by a network server which reads from a composed ‘score’. Each of the printers plays from a different ‘part’ comprised of rhythms and pitches made up of letters of the alphabet, punctuation marks and other characters. [The User] uses ASCII textfiles to compose, orchestrate, and synchronize sonorous and densely textured, rhythmically-driven music. During the half hour performance, the sounds are amplified and broadcast over a sound system. The audience is also presented with live images of the sound sources: the motions of the mechanisms, rollers and gears are captured using miniature video cameras installed inside the printers and projected onto large screens.

There’s another project by [ The User ] that sounds worth investigating (and also has an album on the iTMS): Silophone, in which they use the acoustic capabilities of an empty grain silo to produce sounds…

Silophone makes use of the incredible acoustics of Silo #5 by introducing sounds, collected from around the world using various communication technologies, into a physical space to create an instrument which blurs the boundaries between music, architecture and net art. Sounds arrive inside Silo #5 by telephone or internet. They are then broadcast into the vast concrete grain storage chambers inside the Silo. They are transformed, reverberated, and coloured by the remarkable acoustics of the structure, yielding a stunningly beautiful echo. This sound is captured by microphones and rebroadcast back to its sender, to other listeners and to a sound installation outside the building. Anyone may contribute material of their own, filling the instrument with increasingly varied sounds.

I love bizarre stuff like this. I’ve purchased both of the albums from the iTMS, and have been enjoying what I’ve heard so far — in many ways, these projects remind me of some of the songs that first got me into the industrial genre, with Einstürzende Neubauten running around inside empty water towers and banging on the walls to create a rhythm track or throwing forks at an electrified shopping cart to see what noises would result, or local Anchorage industrial band Fsunjibleableje crafting an entire performance around rhythmically destroying an old abandoned car with sledgehammers.

Okay, so it’s not for everyone.

I think it’s cool, though.