Shearwater Records is pleased to announce the eleventh in a series of weekly – more or less – releases in their virtual seven inch “OCF” series.
Digital Edit – OCF 11
In the year 1998, notorious Wellington record collector Simon Mossman gave his autistic younger brother Julian, who was still living with their parents in Levin, a computer with some cracked audio software and a soundcard. Julian immediately began to experiment with making loops of whatever came to hand: found sound, advertisements, commercial radio, TV themes, his parents’ Boston Pops Orchestra and Gilbert and Sullivan records. Simon hooked him up with French label l’Elefante, who released two albums of Julian’s material, ‘Songs of Sincerity and Pain,’ (2000), and ‘Unpardonable Regret’ (2001).
Hans Grüber was a guitarist in a decade’s worth of Dusseldorf punk bands, the best known of which was Die Elektrische Haus. Around 2000 he did what many of us were doing back then, and made the big shift to improvised music, employing a style heavily influenced by Derek Bailey’s ‘non-idiomatic’ guitar playing. In 2001 Die Elektrische Haus disbanded after the tragic death of their charismatic singer in a car accident. At the same time, Grüber bought a copy of ‘Unpardonable Regret’, and, seeking a new music project for his attention, realised that Mossman’s sparse, hiccupping cut-ups would fit exactly with the sharp, semi-random attacks of his new-found technique.
Grüber wrote to Mossman, asking him if he’d like to collaborate, and include a cd-r of three tracks which Mossman immediately sliced to pieces. The Digital Edit sound was born, which the pair have pursued ever since with monomaniacal intensity. They’ve become something of a minor legend, famously having never met in the flesh – in fact, still knowing next to nothing about each other on a personal level. Grüber, for example, only discovered that Mossman is fifteen years his junior when he read it in the Wire article about them, and they only realised that they’d been living ten minute’s walk from each other when in London for two years when Mossman casually mentioned in an email to Grüber that he’d moved back to New Zealand.
Over the decade of their existence, Digital Edit’s sound has remained entirely unchanged. They are what it says on the box: Grüber hacks and slashes at his long suffering Ibanez, and the result is digitally edited by Mossman chopping and slicing the notes in virtuoso displays of the audio knife-master’s art.
Here are two examples. The first dates from 2001 and is an out-take of their first album ‘The Return to Torque, Mistaken’, and the other
was completed by Mossman only three weeks ago. Feel your ears re-opening.
Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 12 Mb.
This and previous releases are archived at http://shearwaterrecords.blogspot.com/
