Loading details…
Album
Device for Makehappy
stephen gard →27 listeners43 plays
jazzelectroniccontemporary classicalorchestralglitch
about this album
Every composer of musique concrète ought at some stage to pay dues to M. Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of this genre, by creating one or more pieces of 'machine music'. Musique concrète is constructed from the sounds produced by mechanical devices in operation. In 1948, Schaeffer used the then-new device, a magnetic tape-recorder, to capture noises of steam locomotives and rolling stock, at a Paris depot. Schaeffer chopped up, duplicated, reordered and in other ways manipulated these tapes to create his famous 'Étude aux Chemins de Fer' ('Railway Study'). ‘Device for Makehappy’ is Stephen Gard's modest tribute to this imaginative artist who showed us how to compose musical works in response to our technology-dominated culture, by using the voices and pulses of technology itself. For ‘broth’ (Track 2) Gard used open-reel tape-recorders to manipulate the sounds, an act of homage to M. Schaeffer. The machines whose voices sampled for this album have in common the property that each is designed to contribute, somehow, towards the happiness of the human race. 1. CEREC... 6.22 Sounds captured in a dental surgery, as the busy burrs of an astonishing robotic device carved a replacement molar from a cube of wonder-substance. The carving matches a 3D computer image of the ‘missing’ tooth. As most people prefer teeth to be present rather than absent, Chairside Economical Restoration of Esthetic Ceramics is a cause of happiness. 2. broth ... 5.53 More robots at work. This clatteri
