V/A "VARIABLE RESISTANCE: 10 Hours of Sound from Australia" cd

Variable Resistance— a co-presentation between 23five Incorporated and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—originally celebrated this Australian renaissance with a 10 hour ‘listening event’ in September of 2002. From those ten hours, curator Philip Samartzis distilled the best tracks to be featured on this CD compendium. Variable Resistance is a title that encapsulates the tone and extent of the work on hand, referencing not only the electronic gizmo (the variable resistor) as key to many of the featured homespun constructions filtered through state of the art DSP filters, but also as an applicable non-definition of those artists who "offer variable resistance in how they are defined and the positions they occupy in a broader cultural context, fragmented, and dispersed among remote cities and divided by enormous physical and psychological space." Within this disc, the Australian aesthetic finds itself reflecting a number of ideas previously mined throughout the history of electronic music from Mego’s fascination with the streaming micro-textures of digital fragmentation to Metamkine’s conceptual riddles within their Cinema Pour L’oreille series to the brazen noise-junk collages from Merzbow and Otomo Yoshihide. Yet, Variable Resistance resolves its uniqueness by smashing these references with brutish noise and demonstrative force applied to the stereotypically delicate sensibilities of electro-acoustic composition. For instance, Samartzis’ collages of environmental, plundered, and digitized sound meld into psychologically abrasive narrative scalded by toxic agents; Pimmon transforms agitated chunks of granular synthesis into cybersonic lullabies; and David Brown’s jarringly angular duet between a prepared guitar and a squeaking door stands as a steroid injected homage to Pierre Henry’s musique concrete classic Variations Pour Une Porte Et Un Soupir. Along with Samartzis, Brown, and Pimmon, Variable Resistance also features exclusive compositions from Oren Ambarchi, Robbie Avenaim, Philip Samartzis, Xonk, Thembi Soddell, Darrin Verhagen, and Delire