Skip jacks

Scratching the surfaces

by Dougla Wolk

Musical technology doesn't really get fun until people figure out how to take advantage when it goes wrong. Electric guitars got a lot more interesting when feedback became a feature rather than a bug; DJs just played records until they started intentionally scratching them and became turntablists. There are few things more annoying than the sound of a skipping CD: it's an error that jumps into your face, spitting its tick at you five times a second. So it's a good sign that musicians have figured out how to use the CD-skip noise, and lots of other digital errors, in a different context, making them meaningful and even beautiful.

The best-known digital-audio abuser is Oval, a "group" that now consists entirely of Markus Popp. Earlier albums found Popp and Frank Metzger damaging CDs, recording the sound of them skipping, then manipulating those recordings into compositions, but for the last few years Popp has mostly been using processing software to approximate the process. His new Szenariodisk EP (Thrill Jockey) presents a blur of resonant, stringlike tones that turn into one another at a different pace from the scrabbling and chipping noises overlying most of them. He's gone from the almost verse/chorus structures of older pieces like "Shop in Store" (from 94diskont) to near-abstract mathematical forms that start and stop for no particular reason; it's a way of overthrowing the tyranny of the pop song, but it also means that the only easy point of access for listeners is how nice each track's central timbre is.

Nobukazu Takemura uses digital skips exclusively in the service of prettiness. In the five long, gorgeous pieces of Scope (Thrill Jockey), rapid crosscuts between notes act as a kind of aural confetti -- they just add to the fun of his long cycles of Steve Reich-ish marimba tones and happy synth hums. When a sample of a child's voice stutters on a single note or scatters as if someone had pressed a forward-scan button, it serves the same purpose as the harp glissandos that keep popping up in "Kepler" -- it's just a lot of pleasing sounds in a hurry. The only piece that deviates from his sweet chimes and purrs is "Taw," which is built on wobbly, wet noises that sound like a Muppet percolator.

For an interesting look at how Takemura and Oval differ, check out Japanese pop singer Takako Minekawa's new remix EP, Ximer (Emperor Norton). Oval's version of Minekawa's "International Velvet" is all about signal processing; he scrambles her vocals, keeping just enough of her voice intact that it's recognizable over the murky digital soup he's turned the rest of the song into, and the beat is entirely sacrificed to the skipping CD's cyclical scrape. Takemura's 10-minute extension of "Phonoballoon Song," on the other hand, enhances its cuter aspects. The rubbed-balloon noise that hooks Minekawa's little samba becomes the key to the remix: since it's kind of close to damaged-electronics noise anyway, he "stretches and rubs" every timbre he can isolate within the song, then throws in a few minutes of sputtering drums and marimbas to finish it off.

Other artists would rather exploit the skip's nastier side. The Swedish/Austrian duo Rehberg & Bauer center their work on mechanical errors, getting their source sounds from "broken DAT tapes, personal mistakes and total machine failure." Their first album, Fasst (Touch), played with the idea that most digital audio mistakes were somehow cyclical, and therefore as steady a rhythm as one could want to hear. Their new Ballt (Touch) plays up the more chaotic side of computer errors, the kind that spit reams of garbage data or deform rhythms that are supposed to be metronomic into garbled lurches. The pieces are generally simple -- they use only a few frail, piercing timbres at a time, and a little bit of sputtering digital crackle -- but they keep playing chicken with a regular beat, choking at the last moment on a gob of unpredictable noise.

The most extreme use of damaged personal audio technology, though, belongs to the San Diego/San Francisco collective Disc. Miguel Depedro, a contributor to the project who also records solo as Kid-606, says he started listening to skipping CDs for fun years ago. "I didn't really think much of it at first, but soon I began to think that it was truly magical, and that it was this amazing secret gift of digital technology." Disc's brave2ep (Vinyl Communications) is 70 minutes of digital error -- generated by scratching CDs, damaging the circuitry or rotation speed of CD players, arranging for sample-rate conversion errors, shaking media drives, you name it -- edited into 50 short, startling pieces through which tiny fragments of the source material are still audible. The effect is like cutting away the flesh of digital audio to observe its cross-sections: the "perfect sound forever" of the CD ripped in two, exposing the rich imperfections hiding inside.