Voice Crack

I know I haven’t posted anything in over a month, but I’ve been busy with school and work and what not and haven’t had much time to listen to or think about music. Judging by my view count, nobody has noticed, so I’m sure my absence hasn’t unduly riled up the blogosphere. In any case, I recently became interested in listening to a lot of people who use “non-musical” methods to create rather than playing conventional musical instruments or assembling samples on a laptop, and in the world of “cracked electronics” (the modification and rewiring of non-musical devices for repurposing as musical tools), one name constantly comes up – Voice Crack. Norbert Moslang and Andy Guhl started making records in their native Switzerland in the late 70s, and after a couple of more conventionally “musical” efforts quickly abandoned traditional methods to immerse themselves in the creation of their own arsenal of sound devices, home-built or modified from everyday objects. This might involve rewiring cassette players, radios, or cheap keyboards, constructing homemade oscillators controlled by light sensors, or simply banging on pieces of metal or suspended lengths of wire as seen in this video:

So much fun to watch and listen to, and to make as well, I would imagine. People forget the most basic fact about making music that every kid with a 99 dollar Epiphone playing an E chord at maximum volume over and over knows – that making noise is awesome and fun. And Voice Crack is more than just noise – it’s layered and nuanced, and Moslang and Guhl deploy their multitude of textures with a surgeon’s precision. It’s like a couple of immensely talented individuals decided to completely build their own sound world, without any preconceptions about what music should be or what it should even be made with. Utterly primal.

Read the Wikipedia entry here to learn more

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