blog.Crónica

Autodigest machen es der hörerschaft nicht leicht, schnell-beschleunigte Tonsamples und Sprachaufnahmen sind lärmend übereinander geschichtet, um uns dann wieder abrupt in das digitale nichts zu schicken. Komprimierte Tonaufnahmen jeglicher Tonquelle bringen die freiheit des konsumrausches auf den punkt: warum sich mit weniger zufrieden geben als mit Autodigest ? CDs sind spottbillig und die gewinnspanne ist hoch, so veröffentlicht jeder und jede ihre akustischen erzeugnisse, meistens ohne sich die frage zu stellen ob dies jemand hören möchte oder nicht. Bescheiden sind die auflagen, meist limitierte stückzahlen von produkten von denen sowieso nicht mehr hätte verkauft werden können. Damit man doch dann alles hat und keine ängste aufkommen etwas verpasst zu haben empfehlen Autodigest kompressionen, natürlich im Chamber Mix oder live in Stockholm komponiert von jedermann.

Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap… L’ovni sonore de l’année ! Soit l’alignement ininterrompu, pendant une heure, d’applaudissements captés à la fin d’une multitude de spectacles. Un patchwork à mettre au compte d’Autodigest, un des projet les plus emblématique du “media-label” Crónica. Un mystérieux collectif (ou artiste solo) se faisant un malin plaisir de dynamiter le rapport à la musique selon une philosophie esthétique se réclamant autant de Baudrillard et David Harvey que de Debord… Après avoir donné le concert le plus court jamais enregistré (une demi-seconde, montre en main, à Porto en juin dernier !) puis avoir compressé un nombre hallucinant d’Å“uvres musicales sur un seul CD, formant ainsi une sorte d’apocalypse bruitiste, Autodigest s’attaque maintenant au coda ultime de toute oeuvre, son acclamation par un public fervent. Passé les premières minutes d’étonnement puis d’enthousiasme (comme le rire, ces ovations distillent une ferveur très communicative) et enfin de stupeur (mais qu’est que c’est que ce truc ?!), on fini par entendre autre chose ! Par percevoir des variations qui transforment ces standing-ovations en une étrange symphonie… Longtemps après, lorsque nous sommes définitivement immergés dans ce brouhaha, des ondulations se révèlent et ces clameurs finissent par ressembler un peu au bruit de la mer que l’on croit percevoir lorsque l’on se rive un coquillage sur l’oreille… Oeuvre conceptuelle par excellence, ce disque est vraiment un “objet” à part qui n’a d’égal que certaines productions des labels Foton et Firework Edition (Leif Elggren). Bravo, re-clap clap et fermez le banc !

Laurent Diouf

Why applaud? To make a noise, to show approval, because it’s part of the social contract of seeing a performance. (The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt, who has hearing problems, reportedly requests that his audience shows its appreciation by snapping fingers instead of clapping.) Applause is an artless noise; it reinforces the power relationship between the receptive mass slapping its palms together and the (relatively) focused expertise on the stage. It also can be a demand for a present everyone knows will be awarded, a way to call back a performer for the inevitable encore, the lagniappe without which we consider our experience incomplete.

If you want to hear applause for its own sake, there’s Autodigest’s A Compressed History of Everything Ever Recorded, Vol. 2: Ubiquitous Eternal Live (Ash International/Crónica). The back cover describes it as a “spontaneous, improvised, slow crescendo by every audience ever.” It is exactly an hour of applause, bookended by a commanding voice twice announcing, “Thank you! Good night!” It’s not just the kind of ooh-that’s-good applause heard on Burma’s live albums; it’s riotous, maniacal, progressively louder and more rapturous clapping and cheering from an audience that demands more. Shrieks leap out of it like dolphins. As the shouting and clapping redoubles and layers over itself, faint patterns emerge. They become overtones, notes, even faint tunelets. The applause can become the featured attraction, and does to anyone who buys or hears the album. It can go on forever. “Best played in ‘Repeat’ mode,” a note says.

There’s one other brilliant joke on Ubiquitous Eternal Live: When you put the CD in a computer, it identifies itself as “I am sitting in a room.” That’s the title of a 1966 piece by composer Alvin Lucier, in which he recorded himself reading a short text about what he was doing (and stuttering a bit), then played it back in the room where he’d recorded it and recorded that, and repeated the process until the decay of the source material and the room’s resonant frequencies had together evolved into a single faintly fluctuating tone that sounds like the overtones of the applause. (Mission of Burma’s Miller actually did something conceptually similar on his 1990 album Oh (guitars, etc . . . ): “F.W.R.,” short for “The Fun World Reductions,” is a series of playbacks of Burma’s recording “Fun World,” doubling the speed each time, until it’s no more than a quarter-second burst of trebly static.)

On the front cover of Ubiquitous Eternal Live, there’s a picture of an empty bed being hit by morning sunlight; the audience is still out clapping, or maybe we’re the audience. Behind the disc itself, there are two X-rays of hands. An audience’s unsated desire for more can make them slam together hard, hundreds of times. What will it do to those bones?

Douglas Wolk

La Crónica si sta velocemente imponendo all’attenzione degli appasionati di ellettronica ‘colta’ grazie a pubblicazioni che cercano di rimettere in gioco il discorso intrapeso dal movimento glitch. (…)

Il secondo volume realizzato dal progetto Autodigest prosegue invece all’insegna dell’eccedenza: un’unica traccia interamente registrata con applausi e urla del pubblico, un progressivo climax che, come è scritto nelle note di copertina, chiama in causa “La Societè Dello Spettacolo” di Debord. Ma anche Adorno e (ovviamente) Baudrillard, insistendo sulla meccanicità della fruizione fonografica, sull’apatia e sulla stupida ingenuità dell’approccio all’arte in un periodo storico in cui ‘è il processo di consumo, non il suo oggetto, che stiamo attualmente vivendo’. Impossibile, dunque, prescindere dalle intenzioni ideologiche di “Ubiquitous Eternal Live” per la valutazione di un album così assolutamente fuori dall’ordinario.

Michele Casella

Accompanied by mysterious pictures of nearly deserted places, but with a blurred photo of a cheering crowd in a stadium or concert hall, Autodigest’s new installment is a tough one to, ahem, digest. Conceived as a “history of audience applause” (“Somewhere along the way, we seem to have forgotten what exactly we were cheering for… Until we eventually stopped cheering, as nobody was playing anyway”), the hour-long track is exactly made of that: endlessly looped samples of applauses and cheers and delirious screaming. No other sounds, except for a minimal drone which actually sounds like a kind of resonance or echo of that hyper-exposed apocalyptic mess. Quoting the press sheet, “[The piece] is presented as less of an archive and more of a critical eye loaded with a few conceptual cards as foundations, from Debord to Baudrillard, from Harvey to Adorno”. Whatever. It was fun to read a few reviews which have been published meanwhile, as they spanned from “pure genius” to “pure crap” to a more diplomatic “most bizarre record of 2004”. I recall listening to an untitled work by Francisco López and thinking it was a bad joke as it was only crickets sounds throughout, then re-listening to it some years later and losing myself in it with amazement. Save for the political/conceptual differences, this is a similar case: it starts sounding like a joke, then it finally makes your bowels churn. The screaming voices, once looped and overlapping in a droning mass, pass from pop hysteria to pure tragedy – this could be a nightmare of Altamont. But on a deeper level, what makes this cd so frightening to me is the sense of futility and loneliness oozing from this sweaty über-audience – Autodigest coldly re-creates and contemplates modern nonsense as in an in vitro test.

Eugenio Maggi

At first, it makes you think of a bad joke or a divertissement: an infinite round of cheer and applause sampled from live recordings, more or less the same for long minutes. Then you notice it: there’s a drone – a dark, deep growl – lurking under all this mess. The low buzz slowly grows, while the voices start sounding tense, saturated with negative energy in dire need of exploding. And explode they do, in the shape of “soloists” (male and female fans) screaming their lungs out of bodies like if they were skin-burnt in hell flames; this progressively apocalyptic mess literally ices me (no pun intended). Such a “reality based” composition is certainly uncommon; I can only recall Ror Wolf’s “Der ball ist rund”, made with layers of football TV speakers’ voices – but “Ubiquitous Eternal Live” is sonically devastating, nerve-shattering and right to the target, which is the description of the totally idiotic behaviour and utter desperation intrinsically present in all kinds of people – especially when amassed. We’re all destined to be eaten by the “blob” that’s everyday life’s brain deterioration. Autodigest is a genius.

Massimo Ricci

Avec leur projet conceptuel plutôt dingue capable de jouer des concerts d’une seconde comme de compresser en un seul album toute l+histoire de la musique, les Portugais anonymes d’Autodigest poursuivent leur exploration des limites de la composition à l’heure où quelques secondes suffisent à télécharger un titre qu’il faudra cinq minutes pour écouter, et peut-être deux mois pour composer. Pour ce faire, ils utilisent cette fois-ci le biais de l’album live. Evidemment, il serait trop facile de s’en tenir là, et chez Autodigest, le concert, forme “brute” et immédiate du rapport entre l’artiste et son public, est avant tout un objet sociétal qui mérite d´être étudié. Que serait un concert sans la musique? Que resterait-il si seuls les spectateurs étaient présents? Résulte de cette interrogation délirante une heure d’applaudissements, de sifflements et de foule en délire compilée et remixée à partir de la totalité des albums live sur lesquels Autodigest a pu mettre la main. Hypnotique autant qu’agaçant, Ubiquitous Eternal Live, avec sa dynamique sans cesse avortée et ses mouvements internes, est un OVNI, un de ces disques que l’ón ne sait vraiment s’ils méritent d’être écoutés, en boucle, comme le suggèrent ses auteurs, ou simplement considéré comme uns curiosité situationniste de plus.

Jean-François Micard