Stunning net release by the Portuguese label Crónica is the result of musician/designer from Denmark Morten Riis's creative work. His album Digital Sound Drawings is a real finding for people who are fond of phenomenon in electronic music which is accepted to be called 'glitch'. As Riis himself admitted, he is not interested in creating electronic music using the standard capacity of program facilities. He searches for that very moment when a computer error doesn't yet cause the collapse of the system, but it already makes the machine give unpredictable and that's why absolutely unique result.In Digital Sound Drawings the scheme of direct conversion of digital pictures into audio data is used. It means that the musician actually painted the sound for this not long 6 tracks. As a result we have very amusing pictures of clicks, drones, squeak and gritting which balance on the verge of hearing threshold. Together they produce only total recalibration of auditory system. The real chance to feel as if an experimental object in this activity. Especially when while the album's playing you look at the spectrogram and oscillogram of the signal you understand that you are influenced by some new sound system. Or rather some subsystem hidden inside the structure of any complicated sound. When I was listening to Digital Sound Drawings first very loudly, several times I felt hot and cold. The same was the organism's reaction to the abrupt amplitude changes and to the general unnatural audio surrounding. I must admit that for many people the album will seem to be a sharp and maybe unpleasant collection of sounds. This is a very complicated work, not dry, dirty noise or predictable collage of loops. For those who'll be imbued with this album contains something more - new sounds, new emotions and the change of world-view...
- Crónica
- Morten Riis