Genre Study: Glitch Ambient

 

Bin 3, Part 1 (17 min)

Ijspret 1              2:26 Machinefabriek
Faithful Friend 4:02 The Humble Bee
On Waiting        8:44 Greg Haines & Wouter van Veldhoven
Variation 2        5:09 Molly Berg + Stephen Vitiello

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This is what I refer to as crafty ambient music, because it is obvious that instrumental craftmanship is emphasized just as much as production techniques. Aligned more with glitch, this ambient music does not rely on spacial harmonics and extremely long tones but focuses on specific textures; balancing field recordings, post production noodling and instrumental works into a carefully composed harmony. 

Work in Progress: Experiments in Audio Degeneration

Liftoff tape bell loop by colepierce

liftoff-tape-bell-loop

Work in Progress, experimenting with analog distortion, this track is comprised of samples of stages of audio degeneration. I'm using a loop of bells and kids toys that I made with Forrester, recorded to cassette and stripped off portions of the magnetic tape with typewriter liftoff tape. This was digitized, looped and dubbed back onto the damaged cassette, then I distorted the tape further by wrinkling it with my fingers. This was again digitized and I layered the audio into 3 tracks, applying effects using Ableton.

T. Carter Mixtape

Side A
The Dirty Three -Red,
T.Carter -The Warning,
Sia - Breath Me (Four Tet Mix),
Sebadoh - Subtle Holy Gift,
Radiohead -In Limbo,
J Dilla - One Eleven,
Elvis Perkins - Moon Woman II,
Nina & Jim - Our Discussion,
Sebadoh -Whitey Peach,
Aric Naue - Tropical Depression,
T.Carter - The Hindenburg


Side B

Phillip Glass -A Gentleman's Honor,
Isolee - Face B,
Flying Lotus-Auntie's Lock,
Child's View - Asse Que Dodo,
Edan - Promised Land,
High Places - From Stardust to Sentience,
Hot Chip - The Warning

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Tyler's Blog
I Wanted to Write an Email

Mixtape, May 2005 - Sweat Equity

Widely eclectic bbq mixtape I made 4 years ago.

Side A

1 sweat equity side A by colepierce

John Grisham - excerpt from Testament, Charlie Hunter - New Orleans Organ Interlude, Skip Spence, Sonic Youth - Tokyo Eye, Caribou - Barn Owl, The Modern Lovers - Modern World, Fennesz - Asusu, Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks - Animal Midnight, Mouse on Mars - Fantastic Analysis, Willie Nelson - Georgia on my mind, Gustavo Santaollalla - La Partida, Piano Magic - Saint Maria, The Dining Rooms - Catania City Blues, Earth Wind & Fire - Can't Hide Love, M. Ward - Sweathearts on Parade, One unshod horse passes on rough, John Grisham - excerpt from the Testament


Side B

2 sweat equity side B by colepierce

The Sea & Cake, Califone - Pastry Sharp, The Cinematic Orchestra - Channel 1 Suite (Four Tet Mix), Stevie Nicks - Gypsy, The Arcade Fire - Haiti, Bernard Hermann - Twisted Nerve, Timeout Drawer - Soon a winged beauty will appear, Skip Spence, Ogurusu Norahide, Nanci Griffith - Boots of Spanish Leather, Secret Chiefs 3 - Book T -Exodus

Frog & Toad Tape

My dad asked me if I could copy a tape to a cd for him. I said sure, what is the tape? He just laughed and said I'd like it. Next time my parents visited he handed me an instructional tape on identifying frog and toad for species found in Iowa. The tape sounds a bit damaged, perhaps by a magnet.

1 Frog & Toad Tape by colepierce

As you can all imagine, the canadians destroyed my mix cd

Fence

Fence

As you can all imagine

As you can all imagine, my latest mix has been mailed to 50 of my closest friends and the mp3 version is available to download. This one is a lightweight, starts off slow easing from long form jazzy ambient, leading into the second set of chilled out jazz and dub influenced jams, including an excellent Marcie Sampson track borrowed from DJ Bylamplight over at Liquid Dilemma. The third set ends up in downtempo idm but begins with 3 disparate songs that use a similar mind melting organ melody. The mix was printed in an edition of 50 using block printing ink and a yoga mat, packaged with cropped pages from a found algebra book inside a fiberboard case. A zip file of the mix is available on colepierce.com, just in time for a 3 day weekend.

Link to Cole Pierce Mixes

Music Box - You are pretending to be a sea-horse

Music box  by  colepierce

This is a recording from 2007 of my son talking about a music box my wife gave me for Christmas. 

The aquarium style music box contains spinning sea-horses, one of which has a cut out photo of my head 

taped to the sea-horse.

Golden Eagle Storage

Golden Eagle Storage, originally uploaded by colepierce.

one evening a while ago

different electro

different electro, originally uploaded by colepierce.

Rest

Rest, 1-4
Cole Pierce, 2009
Acrylic on Canvas
65"x65"

Active Archive

Active Archive
Cole Pierce, 2009
Oil Paint, 3.5" Floppy Discs, Nails
Dimensions Variable
Currently 58" x 80"

Tight Quarters

Tight Quarters (Signal Distortion), Excerpt
Cole Pierce 2009
Digital Video and Sound Installation
10'04

Tight Quarters, Full Version

The working title for this piece is Distortion/Tight Quarters (2009) and is intended it to be a wall sized projection.

The source material for the video is a glitch between a DVD recorder and a monitor. The audio was originally a piano recording, but it has gone through several generations of analog and digital manipulations.

Style

The infinitely reproducible item collides with obsolescence, leaving an emptiness that I associatively compare to the point past comprehension. 

Tv distortion video stills

tv distortion ending

tv distortion ending, originally uploaded by colepierce.

tv distortion

tv distortion, originally uploaded by colepierce.

Found Answering Machine Tape

I digitized a portion of this tape I found in the attic of a house I had a studio in (Colfax).  There is one message but the majority of the 20 minute recording is noise, cracks and creaks.  I might use it as part of an art installation in the future, but don't have any real plans yet. Download a high quality 243 mb AIFF recording of the tape here . Or a 27 mb MP3 here. 

Art Collecting, I own ten countries

I recently acquired ten sculptures of countries through an art trade with Chicago based artist and collector Ben Foch. Read about his project The World in this Proximity article. In short, Ben made a sculpture of every country and priced them according to their GDP value (1 USD to 1 Billion GDP/PPP). The piece was exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in January of 2009. I traded my series of triangle paintings that I showed at Old Gold last November. When I was initially trying to decide which countries I wanted to own, I had no idea what strategy to use. I looked for a continent, but there was not one intact due to previous sales. I considered picking countries that I thought were cool, or had interesting music scenes happening, but Iceland was taken and Sweden and Norway are ugly. I almost chose every country in the southern 30 - 45 latitude region. Instead, I picked countries for formal reasons, their size and shape and sexy curves.

Selection of Ben Foch's The World, 2009
Installation View, my living room.

Pakistan and New Zealand
Chile
Myanmar

The World

Peru
Saudi Arabia
South Africa
Turkey
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan

Destroyer

My 2 yr old daughter made this fantastic sticker design. 

The Wanderer, Illustration by "Phiz"

wanderer by phiz, originally uploaded by colepierce.

Phiz does these great illustrations in Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Nelson Will Take Over From Now On, side B

Side B of Tyler Carter's mixtape Nelson Will Take Over From Now On (circa 2002). 55 minute mp3 zipped and uploaded to sendspace. idm, downtempo, hip-hop tinged. download it here.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

CHAPTER XXXVIII
A DISSOLUTION OF PARTNERSHIP

I did not allow my resolution, with respect to the Parliamentary Debates, to cool. It was one of the irons I began to heat immediately, and one of the irons I kept hot, and hammered at, with a perseverance I may honestly admire. I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and sixpence); and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies' legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly, throught these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyption Temple in itself, there then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb, meant expecation, and that a pen and ink sky-rocket stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out of it; then, beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking them up, I dropped the other fragments of the system; in short, it was almost heart-breaking.

pp 444-445