The venerable Yasunao Tone leaves the skipping CDs aside to work with disrupted MP3 files on this visceral new work for Editions Mego. As an original member of Japan's Fluxus movement and the legendary Group Ongaku, besides more recent collaborations with Florian Hecker and Christian Marclay, Tone has spent a lifetime operating at the vanguard of experimental art and music, and it's fitting that he has now moved on from manipulating prepared CDs to dissecting and using corrupted MP3 files in his latest compositions. The results found on 'MP3 Deviation #8' are bracing and beautifully abstract, if you like this kind of thing, but we'd best let him explain the ideas behind it: "The MP3 DEVIATION album contains pieces that are results of the collaborative research by a team of the New Aesthetics in Computer Music (NACM) and myself, led by Tony Myatt at Music Research Center at the University of York in UK in 2009. My idea was to develop new software based on the disruption of the MP3. Primarily I though the MP3 as reproducing device could have created very new sound by intervention between its main elements, the compression encoder and decoder. It turned out that result was not satisfactory. However we found that if the sound file had been corrupted int he MP3, the corruptions generated 21 error messages, which could be utilized to assign various 21 lengths of samples automatically. Combining with different playback speeds, it could produce unpredictable and unknowable sound. That is a main pillar of the software. We, also, added some other elements such as flipping stereo channels and phase inversing alternately with a certain length of frequency ranges, which resulted different timbres and pitches." Digital mastering by Russell Haswell, cut for vinyl at 45rpm by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin. Recommended.A MP3 Deviation #8 B MP3 Deviation #8
