Behind Emiter is Marcin Dymiter. I reviewed some of his work, going back quite a few years, and yet his catalogue isn’t very extensive. On his latest release, he explores the sounds of the city, buzzing and whirring. To that end, he walked around town (I assume Berlin, for no reason; I believe this is where he lives) to record the inner workings of traffic lights, street lights, buildings, and whatever else he found on his way. With electromagnetic pickups, human life is absent, and we only hear the city and the sounds it produces. I’m not sure about the extent of processing here, but I assume there’s a fair amount of collaging involved, layering events rather than processing these sounds further. By collaging and editing, Emiter creates a new, digital map of the city, with long roads (drones) and small sideways (crackles, clicks, cuts). Emiter created two distinct works with the material, maybe intended for an LP release. First, there’ the first part of the title piece, 20
minutes long, and a collage-like affair. This is, perhaps, the kind you’d expect people to do with this kind of source material.
Emiter does a solid job here; dark, atmospheric, changing, and churning this stuff around. The other four pieces are shorter, almost like pop songs – this would have been the B-side of the LP. Here, Emiter works his material into song-like structures. There’s rhythm, sampled from the sources, a bit of melody, something reminiscent of a bass line, and there’s even vocals. In ‘Harmonies Of Noise’, Emiter uses Steve Reich-like phase-shifting with this material. Of course, the music never becomes ‘pop music’, even when the sensibilities are there, best exemplified in ‘Dusts And Fluids’. I think I like the idea of turning this into music rather than soundscapes more than the actual execution, which seems a bit ‘muddy’ at times. Still, as an idea, it is something quite lovely, and something that Emiter (and others) should explore further. There’s a world of ideas out there, literally on the streets. (FdW)
via Vital Weekly