Is there something better than silence in the night?

Tonight: Extremity Cassette
A generative audio piece by Anna Friz and Absolute Value of Noise © 2009

Extremity Cassette is a generative audio piece that imagines samples on a near-endless stretch of audio tape. Wound through a complex, multi-head cassette machine, the samples overlap with themselves, repeat, vanish and reappear. The magnetic nature of the machine itself picks up noises from the ether and mixes them with free reed and heterodyne sounds.

The piece imagines a prehistoric mechanism from the time before the emergence of water and organic life .. an ancient magical sound machine that loops and churns out a never ending, ever changing musical score. It works with the sounds of crystals, the creaking of shifting rock, and the magnetic resonance of the earth .. until one day the organic world is introduced .. then rust interferes with the workings of the cassette .. the sounds become progressively more erratic, and eventually it stops.