Artist: TERRE THAEMLITZ
Title: Couture Cosmetique
Label: CAIPIRINHA PRODUCTIONS
Format: CD
Catalog Number: CAI 2002
Excellent strange ambiance from Thaemlitz who has also released full length albums for Mille Plateaux and Instinct. "The sounds generated for Couture Cosmetique emphasize residual noises produced by some of today's more popular digital synthesis techniques -- including granular synthesis, pitch/time convolution and heterodyn filter analysis -- bringing into focus those sounds which currently exist in a repressed state at the periphery of popular contemporary music production."

Artist: TERRE THAEMLITZ
Title: Die Roboter Rubato
Label: MILLE PLATEAUX (GERMANY)
Format: CD
Catalog Number: MP 34
Interpretations of the music of Kraftwerk on treated piano. "Terre Thaemlitz constructs style and sound which reflect the complexity of thematics established by Kraftwerk around the role of postindustrial technologies in the construction of identities and cultures, as well as his own changing and contradictory relationships to those thematics. Consistency of tempo and key, trademarks of Kraftwerk's compositions, are often abandoned. Melodies become obscured, warped and inverted, lost then found, only to be lost again. The piano sound itself is digitally processed with technique. Noise which distorts and clouds like interpretive processes. Resonance which mimics the frustrating research for resonant phrases and associations with the original compositional techniques with socio-political content."

Artist: TERRE THAEMLITZ
Title: Means From An End
Label: MILLE PLATEAUX (GERMANY)
Format: CD
Catalog Number: MP 44
A beautiful, jarring and disruptive work from Thaemlitz whose previous CDs were released by Instinct, Caipirinha and M. Plateaux. Using digital saturation & filtering processes, Thaemlitz creates a disorienting bed of plundered and recontexturalized sound -- distorting into new meaning, droning far beyond mere loopology. "Computer synthesis allows for the analysis and resynthesis of input sound sources. It allows for the generation of a means from a previously constructed end point. Such generations use numeric equivalents of sound waves to establish ranges of numbers which are then edited. Associations between sound sources can be made more or less obvious, depending on one's technique and desire for explicit referentiality. The functions of sound as a material, social and socio-subjective medium lend to it's simultaneous identification as a site, a discourse, and a form of 'personal expression'. The cultural implications of these multiplicious functionalities are anything but harmonious, despite the bourgeois liberal content of music's universality to which the majority of producers, theorists, journalists, manufacturers, and listeners subscribe. Obviously, a major impetus for this project is the reclarification of a desire for contexuality. A desire for contextuality takes as its presupposition limitations of contextual understanding. All re-clarifications of context are denied any essential origin. Rather, notions of origin encapsulate a state of flux, elucidating both the ends and the beginnings of layered transformative contents. Every analysis is simultaneously approached as a site enacted within a social context, a discourse in dialogue with other analysis, and a form of personal expression manifested of desires. Turning to the utilization of sounds towards this end, electroacoustique methodologies have come to philosophically encompass the complexities of this circumstance quite well..." -- Terre Thaemlitz.

Artist: VA
Title: Modulation & Transformation Vol. 3
Label: MILLE PLATEAUX (GERMANY)
Format: 2CD Catalog Number: MP 43 CD
"The third offering by music innovators of the electronic scene in Europe and the States. This compilation, containing 23 tracks on double CD or triple vinyl blends the best of electronic music into an excellent display of contemporary music regardless of genre and method, arranged and improvised, notated and programmed, instrument based and electronic, analog as well as digital. Modulation...Vol 3 again redefines electronic music by rendering the parameters playable, re-entering the musical domain with unprecedented ease. Sound machines are inhabited by heterogeneous sound material, disjunctive varieties, perhaps tones, sounds, noises. Successful musical bodes are something of unique singularity that does not erase the trail of heterogeneity but follows multiples it. Most of the tracks are bringing back a spontaneous feel to electronic music by building up a musical body rather than on the more execution of implemented features and pre-installed presets transforming digital design workplace efficiency into effortless improvisation." Features: Oval, Curd Duca, Jim O'Rourke, Blue Byte, Arno Peters, DJ Spooky, Terre Thaemlitz, Scanner, Gas, Andy Mellwig, Sidewinder, 4E, Steel, Pluramon, Heinrich at Heart, Thomas P. Heckmann, Cristian Vogel, Fetischpark, Kerosene & Jammin Unit.