The object of obsession here is the forthcoming release by Tristan Perich, titled 1-Bit Symphony, due for commercial availability early 2010. I obtained this copy when Perich, along with Lesley Flanigan, performed on Thursday night, November 19, at a new gallery space in San Francisco (Grey Area Foundation for the Arts).

As evidenced above, 1-Bit Symphony isn’t a CD; it’s a small homebrew electronic device nestled inside a CD case. It is, in that way, a kind of parallel to the Buddha Machine (and the forthcoming Gristleism). The 1-Bit Symphony is to the compact disc what the Buddha and Gristleism boxes are to transistor radios. They’re lo-fi music-producing technology packed inside the familiar form of a pretty much outdated music-producing technology.

When the switch seen second from the left inside the box is flipped to its right, the machine starts emitting lo-fi sound (it’s necessary to attach headphones to the audio jack to hear the music). There are five “tracks” in all, “movements” they’re titled here. The first four are between five and 10 minutes in length. The fifth will play forever, or at least until that replaceable battery dies. In brief, the music is a series of cascading little beeps that suggest Philip Glass as a character in a Mario Bros. video game.

1-Bit Symphony is being released by Cantaloupe Music, the label associated with Bang on a Can, and which released a previous Perich tech-in-a-jewel-box project, 1-Bit Music, back in 2006.

There’s a gallery of the images along with some annotation after the jump. Higher resolution versions are available at my flickr.com/photos/disquietpxl account.

The following two images show the “cover” of the “CD.” That typography — the writing “Tristan Perich 1-Bit Symphony” — is an otherwise clear plastic sheet inserted inside the jewel case. My only complaint about the project is that the information sheet doesn’t fit inside the jewel case.

Back cover — actually the white piece of paper that is the release’s liner notes, folded and placed inside the plastic wrapper:

The audio jack pierces the jewel case, tantalizingly encased inside the devices plastic wrapping:

Various angles on the release, minus the liner notes and plastic wrapper:

The device as seen from behind. Note the soldering:

The front and back of the liner notes, once they’ve been unfolded:

The audio jack, exposed:

The device, among friends (two Buddha Machines v1, one Buddha Machine v2, a Korg Kaoss Pad, a Numark mixer, and one of two Technics turntables):

More on Perich at cantaloupemusic.com, onebitmusic.com, and tristanperich.com.

The track is available for download not as an MP3 but as a large OGG. Doing so is recommended, because the latter file is much larger (and, thus, more detailed) than the lo-rez one streaming above.

Full release at rainnetlabel.blogspot.com. More on Aairria/Drabot at aairriamusic.bbs.pl.

Over at the label’s website, frozenelephantsmusic.com, one can not only download the full set as an archive file (ZIP), but stream the individual tracks — which in this case means that you can also easily stream all five simultaneously, an experience I highly recommend, as it creates layers of the already layered material.

Get the full release at con-v.org, where it’s also downloadable as massive, “loss-less” FLAC files.

More on Fleury-Steiner at myspace.com/bfsprojects, and on McFall at myspace.com/christophermcfall.

Participating with me in this week’s MP3 Discussion Group are:

Alan Lockett: “I write music reviews and commentary on ambient/drone, the more adventurous end of techno/house, post-dub, and IDM. Based in Bristol, epicentre of the Dub-zone in the Wild West of England, I can mainly be read on igloomag.com and furthernoise.org.”

Joshua Maremont: “I record as Thermal and pursue my musical and other obsessions in San Francisco.”

The conversation will play out in this post’s comments section.

A little note on discussion format: This is by no means a closed discussion, so do feel free to join in. Also, the initial posts by participants were all written before they had an opportunity to see each other’s take on the album in question.

More on the album at its label’s website, haftw.wordpress.com, and on Kirby and his numerous pseudonyms at discogs.com.

These, by the way, are the covers of the three individual albums contained in Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was.

And that’s just on the track “Our Friends Save Us from Drowning” (MP3). Then there’s the broken loop of “Lately I’ve Been Dreaming of Drinking Sound from a Fountain,” in which the familiar locked groove seems like someone’s replaced their phonograph needle with a sickle (MP3). All five tracks use repetition to reduce the impact of their raw materials, but raw they still are, and the album’s all the better for its lack of refinement.

Full release at restingbell.net.

Back in September, the first On Land festival brought a wide range of quiet-minded electronicists and other music-makers to San Francisco. I caught the first of the three concerts, which were conceived by the Root Strata record label, but unfortunately for me not the one featuring a solo performance by Boston-based musician Keith Fullerton Whitman. Of course, missed concert opportunities aren’t what they once were. Chances are, someone recorded what you didn’t witness — sometimes even the musicians themselves. And fortunately in this case, Whitman has just uploaded a high-quality recording of the nearly 20-minute set to his soundcloud.com/kfw space:

(Audio isn’t the only thing the web can be expected to capture for posterity. The above photo of Whitman performing this piece appears courtesy of flickr.com/photos/nedraggett.)

Fullerton has had lengthy, relatively uncompressed files on SoundCloud in the past, but with the exception of this piece — title: “Live Generator (1) @ On Land” — they’ve all been removed. So, interested parties are advised to take advantage of the little down arrow on the right-hand side of the above interface, and download the 184mb file. (Anyone with audiophilic tendencies take note: the above interface is not streaming the 184mb version of the recording. It’s streaming an MP3 compressed to less than 1/10th that size. For the full-on, you-were-kinda-there listening experience, be sure to get the full 184mb version.)

The 20 minutes feature Whitman in a playful mode. Childlike melodic snippets bounce back and forth in the stereo spectrum, while a rising drone provides a kind of sonic trampoline on which they can have their fun. The fast pace of the melody brings to mind sci-fi soundtracks and early electronic head music more than it does video-games, at least initially, though among the technology employed, according to Whitman, was an emulation of an early game system. He writes:

“… here’s a great recording of my set at the Root Strata ‘On Land’ festival ; this was my first attempt at performing the ‘Generator’ piece in front of people …. the instrumentation is simply two doepfer suitcases full of assorted eurorack modules, an outboard spring reverb, and (at the end) an iphone running a commodore 64 emulator …”

As the performance goes on, that rapid pixel pop gets more and more mangled, until it becomes distorted beyond recognition. In the process, Fullerton explores not only the melody as a kind of barrage, a pattern to set against itself, but also the individual tones, which at times get stretched out to many times their initial length until they threaten to scatter, revealing a whole new set of patterning.

Here, by the way, is my write-up of the first of the three On Land shows, on the afternoon of Saturday, September 19, featuring Danny Paul Grody, Marielle V. Jakobsons (aka darwinsbitch), and William Fowler Collins, among others: disquiet.com.

The work is a collaboration between artists Martin Backes, Christoph Illing, and Heidrun Schramm, all graduates of the school’s program in sound studies.

Lucier’s original score is in the form of instructional music — it isn’t a traditional score (i.e., notes on a page) but a rough sketch combined with detailed written instructions. Despite its simple title, the enactment of Lucier’s work is anything but. The piece also calls for magnets and an audio oscillator, and for the performer to adjust volume levels over the course of a given performance.

This version by Backes, Illing, and Schramm is not a performance, per se — it does not strictly abide to Lucier’s original. They have ingeniously adapted his work to exist as a constant presence — their reinterpretation, thus, shifts “Music on a Long Thin Wire” to a sculptural mode from a concert mode.

More on the installation, in German, at udk-berlin.de.

More on Schramm at myspace.com/sonatarec and virb.com/sonatarec. More on Illing at koolkiller.com. More on Backes, who took the photos and consented to their reproduction here, at myspace.com/martinbackes, aconica.de, and martinbackes.com.