Eric Boivin, the Montreal field recording and sound artist, introduced me to the idea of glitch art with an off-hand remark one Sunday night at CKLN-FM in Toronto. A CD he was playing started to malfunction on-air. The laser diode bounced around the disc’s content with a kind of beautiful abandon. “These discs are so musical when they don’t work,” Boivin said to me.
I knew exactly what he meant. Around that time, the Touch and Go label released a 12-inch single by Big Black called “I Can’t Explain.” It was a one-sided vinyl release that featured a locked-groove at the end — essentially a never-ending track.
What was happening on Boivin’s show that night was a kind of peak into the future. Remember that CDs were marketed in those early days as incorruptible. We still lived in an analog world at the end of the 1980s. To my young ears that night, Boivin’s CD sounded like a warning and promise all at once. Digital tech would disappoint us, and that would be fascinating.
It was around this time that European and Asian artists began experimenting with glitchy sounds as an extension of the sound art being produced at the time. Autechre, Alva Noto, Yasunao Tone and Ryoji Ikeda were early adopters. It wasn’t long before the artform’s core principle — that these highly textural sounds previously thought of as flaws could be musical — became a staple of pop music production.
Remarkably, now more than three decades later, the glitch aesthetic remains a driving force in contemporary music. It dominates sound art and much else.
Joseph Branciforte and Jozef Dumoulin have delivered a wonderful nod to that tradition today, a 70-minute tour de fierce entitled ITERAE. Both artists perform on Fender Rhodes and electronics; Branciforte adds live editing.
The interplay is the finest we’ve heard in the genre since Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto produced their five-disc collection V.I.R.U.S. Both collaborations combine world-class performances with a deeply insightful understanding of the genre’s potential.
And just as it occurred to Boivin and me that night nearly 40 years ago, both projects present us a style of music that is as inventive as it is a commentary on the nature of digital innovation.
More new music
Andrew Anderson – Thresholds: Anderson gives us four stunning sound collages on this follow-up to his 2019 debut Velvet Fjord. Each are recorded live.
Yann Novak – Meadowsweet (redux): This 20th-anniversary re-release is as powerful and contemplative as the day it first landed. Produced following the passing of Novak’s mother, it remains a compelling statement about loss and absence.
Veiled Existence – All the Quiet Hurts: These two long-form sound art pieces will rattle your teeth and tickle your ears.
The Moderns 