EVOL Doctor Hoover

Hornblower: EVOL

“Computer Music For Hooligans” is the proud motto for the activities of EVOL, a project with Roc Jiménez de Cisneros at its centre. His current collaborator is Stephen Sharp from Alloa, Scotland. EVOL’s recent brace of vinyls, Rave Slime and Punani Xerrameca, are provocative alright, a slap round the chops for the furrowed-brow seriousness of much laptop music. Both releases pay homage to the ‘Hoover’ sound, a synth patch originally called ‘What The?’ engineered by sound designer Eric Persing for the Roland Corporation in 1986. The Hoover is a fecund splatter of synth snarl that inevitably conjures up the well mental delights of rave music in general. However, EVOL dispense with the rave beats and explore the Hoover in its naked glory.

The Punani Xerrameca 10" documents EVOL’s frequent live shows during 2008. Jiménez de Cisneros explains the context: “It’s a weird mixture of venues and atmospheres, from a museum in France to a club in Tokyo, or a private event at SND’s studio in Sheffield. It’s great to have one show in an art gallery and the next in a noise joint.” Listening to EVOL’s squiggling synth firecrackers is a disorientating experience – the sound cries out for a dancefloor, yet the agenda is clearly elsewhere. He tries to help: “We’re not just taking it out of context – in Rave Slime the rave sound is a starting point rather than a goal. Part of it is a tribute, because we just like that type of rich synth. But these sounds haven’t developed that much in the context of rave music; for years they have been referenced over and over again, so they no longer feel exciting or shocking like the first time you heard “Mentasm” or any of those classic tunes. On the other hand, this convergence is perfectly natural: we are part of a generation of artists who have somehow bridged the gap between the academic side of computer music and club culture. Rave is the psychedelic experience of our generation, and there’s a lot of psychedelic intention in EVOL.”

Nothing says hooligan quite as clearly as a hand-held pressurized gas horn, and in December 2009 EVOL released a 7" of an acoustic recording: gas horns blasting air into one another in a frenzied mimicking of electronic sounds. What started as a gag in a Spanish club led Jiménez de Cisneros to a residency at the Music Research Centre of York University: “I first used gas horns in 1999, for an EVOL show in Barcelona. It was supposed to be an ironic reference to hooligan culture in the middle of an abstract computer music performance. But after a while, I realised it could be more than a joke and started playing the horns in different ways, trying to emulate some of the synthesis techniques used on the show… It’s a powerful tool to get the message across, but for me that is not the point anymore – it’s just impossible to get rid of the cultural baggage of a gas horn, or a rave-type synth for that matter.”

Indifference is not an option with EVOL, as their music leaps out from the speakers and grasps your lapels. Do they feel other computer music is a tad moribund? “There are great things happening in computer music today, but there’s also a disturbingly large portion of it that seems to be trapped in clichés and traditions that make it very boring. That’s why Goodiepal got fed up and started lecturing about what he calls Radical Computer Music and the disappearance of utopia in this field. As a listener I am more interested in being exposed to things that shock and excite me, and it’s not easy to find that, whether it’s in academia or in popular culture.”  Rave Slime and Punani Xerrameca are out now on Alku Clive Bell

Any enterprise involving Mattin carries a ton of conceptual baggage. His output reflects his ongoing struggle with the social and political contradictions encoded into the very act of performing or releasing work. But that’s why he’s such a vital performer, theorist and organiser. The Mattin-curated Free Software Series has just entered its fourth year of activity with a trio of intriguing releases. What sets the output of the label apart is the way its production mirrors its distribution. Each new disc in the series is made available as a free lossless download under one of various anti-copyright and creative commons licences that regulate the conditions of its redistribution. (The albums can also be purchased as CD-Rs.)

This freedom-with-responsibility ethos with which the consumer is invited to comply is a logical extension of the principle that underpins the creation of the work. Each album is made using free software at every stage of its production – that is, software which can be modified and freely redistributed, with the proviso that users must be able to continue to customise the code. Though diverse in style, the releases share a sense of limits being tested; interrogating the very notion of creating and distributing computer music.

The three most recent releases push this interrogation further than anything the catalogue has thrown up so far. On one level, Joaquin Lana’s Jacobin Of Noise may be a somewhat dispiriting trawl through a fug of over-familiar granular hiss, but framed in the ideological context of its means of production, it works as a critique of the kind of tech-obsessed, forensically arid noise making that wins digital arts prizes. Oscar Martin aka Noish’s noise&capitalism.txt >>dev dsp converts the text of the titular Mattin co-edited essay collection into audio – a conceptual gesture with predictably curious though ultimately meaningless sonic results. Christian Galarreta’s Computer Music Is Dead goes even further; the computer is only used as a source of electromagnetic energy captured as noise. Software is not even used until the album’s coda, which sees the Peruvian laptopper monitoring the electrical field as he performs various programming tasks unrelated to audio processing. Bizarrely, it’s by far the most musically enjoyable of the three releases even as it seems to question the validity of its own existence.

The Free Software Series makes a contribution to an idealised community offering a form of digital resistance to the philistine forces of Capital, while simultaneously critiquing the naive utopianism of such a movement. Getting involved and revelling in the contradictions would appear to be the only course to follow.  freesoftwareseries.org Keith Moliné

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