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about this album
Pulse Codes is the second album of glitch/microsound music that Stephen Gard created from sampled short-wave radio transmissions. This new work focusses on the rhythmical qualities of such transmissions, especially the ostinato-like beats of digitally encoded signals. Many, but not all, digital modes are used by amateur radio operators, who are usually more interested in medium than message, and in the challenge of communicating with low-power, home-made equipment and experimental software, over long distances. Hence, their choice of repetitious error-checking modes. Pulse Codes also moves off-planet. Gard drew on cosmic sonic material, freely available as files floating in cyberspace: the sounds of the universe captured by radio astronomy, some historical tape-recordings, data sonifications, and transmissions from exploratory spacecraft, like the recent Huygens Titan probe. The genre of some Pulse Codes pieces is less strictly musique concrète than was the music of ite predecessor Carriers: here and there, Gard has added improvised material, created with vocalizations and synthesizer keyboard - a touch of Techno. Pulse Codes vibrates with the restless toccatas of technology. 1. chortle (3.09) The central pulse here is from a HF facsimile transmission, probably an image of some portion of the earth, sent by a weather satellite. 2. grind (3.00) A concatenation of modes, whose common sound is a grinding or rattling sonority. The sharp, sweeping gesture heard here and t
