5 CD Players Playing At Once

My never ending pursuit of interesting music leads me to the craziest places. After spending 3 hours trying to find an experimental noise/early electronic musician that I listened to in the past, I… well, found what I was looking for. Bernhard Günter’s Un Peu De Neige Salie.

I know this is gonna be peak if it’s “german name - french title”. Title translates to “a little dirty snow”, I suppose that’s a nod to germans sometimes calling TV static “Schnee” (snow).

– Response by friend on a music forum.

I can’t recommend listening to it. And if you do listen to it and understand it’s appeal, purpose, reason, or enjoy it—please contact me immediately, I would love to be your friend. I shared the album with the expectation that most would recoil in horror from it, but I got a great response from a very savvy individual. In fact, we talked and had a good discussion on experimental music and growth in artistic taste, and about coming to like “weird” music.

Anyways, I found the album on a Youtube channel uploaded by someone other than its artist, and I looked at the rest of the uploads on that channel. The internet always astounds, as the uploader, “DEEPHOUSETROOPER”, with 996 subscribers, happened to have a few dozen other uploads of niche or odd music that led to the creation of this text.

I listened to a few and wasn’t interested in many, until I came across Charles Curtis - Ultra White Violet Light / Sleep which grabbed my attention after I scanned through the album. The upload had the album sorted where each track played in order after the other, as normal music does, but such an arrangement actually doesn’t allow the album to be played to its full potential. Finally, an explanation for the title of this text.

Ultra White Violet Light / Sleep

The album is 4 tracks of equal length, shipped on 4 separate sides/CDs. The CDs can be played in nearly any way possible: every track playing at once, one track playing alone, or any combination of tracks being played. Furthermore, the tracks can be played “out of sync” with one another, so that if a track started 5 seconds after another, or even a minute, the mix doesn’t run into any grating or glaring issues. Or at least it doesn’t sound like it. Perhaps someone who likes the arrangement where all four tracks play at the same time doesn’t like any other arrangement featuring the tracks not starting at the same time. But to me, it still sounds great. Maybe I’m not the best judge—after all, I am listening to Un Peu De Neige Salie as I write this. Here is the “Stero Mixdown” which is all four sides played at once.

At first, I thought, “Cool, but isn’t this basically the same thing as four different instruments coming together to form a band? Isn’t every song made by just putting multiple channels or parts together into one?” But after further musing, I found various aspects of the album that make it stand out to me.

One is that a singular track features multiple instruments, and the track can stand on its own as a song. Generally, the core structure of songs give instruments roles, and thus the removal of an instrument makes the song lopsided, for the sound it is trying to produce. I believe Curtis gets around this by playing with genre conventions, so to speak.

For example, Side A features little if any rhythm, meter, or time signature. Side B includes the drum kit that sets a rhythm for the overall album, and thus has to include the specific way of playing the guitar on this side. If it was on any other side and out of sync with the side containing the drums, it would clash, creating poor sounding music.

This is why I say Curtis uses “genre conventions”—each side has to contain particular qualities or conventions, and exclude others. You end up with Side A being the side that features no rhythm. Genres are separated by the differences in particular qualities or conventions present in a song. Thus, each side is “a different genre”—containing different instruments, techniques, and themes.

How amazing! The ability to understand music at such a level you can assemble multiple tracks able to stand on their own but also enhance each other by being played at the same time, without running into any issues. No wonder Curtis is a professor at a west coast university.

Here is another aspect of the album that stands out to me: how the individual songs sound alone, and how they make each other better. In order of sides with the most mainstream appeal, I would say Side B is the “easiest” to listen to, then D, then A, then C. Side B definitely falls into “Hey, this is a ‘normal’ song, maybe a bit barebones, but it has a lot of structure”.

Side D is especially interesting to me. Its most prominent features are its arching cellos that drastically shift from low to high pitch using glissandos, with spoken word. My claim is that this creates a moody, almost psychedelic feel with the lyrics recalling a somewhat melancholy experience. The lack of emotion in the voice contrasts with the eerie strings well. The lyrics work perfectly with the tone and vocal performance:

In fact
I guessed
This was the sort of rose that blooms
For only a day altogether.

It was
Just the right rose
To give to this girl
By evening, the rose would be wilted
She would be lying in her boyfriend’s arms
Having nearly forgotten about me

–Side D

Side A, I suppose you could say, is more classical sounding in nature. Other than it’s use of the sine wave and sustained electric guitars, the cellos dominate, but they have a strong structure: the cellos “go somewhere”, arching together, falling out from harmony with eachother, and slowly finding their way back together again.

Side C is definitely the furthest out, in terms of general appeal. It is a more ambient electronic track. Long layers of sustained tones in harmony. “It’s just noise!” a friend said when I showed him the track. Jokes on him, the noise genre is all about utilizing the random, unwanted audio artifacts and commonly producing the harshest noise known to man. And Side C, though basic, slowly adds and removes long, beautiful drones.

Lastly, I should expand upon a claim I made earlier in this text. I state that the sides can be played “out of sync” with each other. There is not a lot of writing about this album, and most of the writing either states the tracks can be “freely combined”, “all heard at once”, or played “simultaneously”. The language is vague enough that I cannot tell if the sides were intended to be “synced” with one another, as in, all started at the same time. That being said, art is not just about the beauty created by intention; a moment being invisible to the author but visible to the audience doesn’t make that moment any less great.

However, I believe my criticism can be expanded upon; I definitely didn’t catch everything. I think the biggest details I’m missing regarding some of the artistic details are Side C’s relevance to the album’s themes and the connection of Side B’s lyrics to its music.

For example, I believe all the other sides have a connection between eachother; the fact that one side emphasizes rhythm and the others don’t. Additionally, within each individual side, the instruments interact, like my example with the eerie cello and near monotone vocal performance. I don’t really know what Side C does other than give tones that aid the overall sound of the composition.

Regarding Side B’s connection between its lyrics and music— is the fact that Side B the only side with rhythm supposed to work in tandem with the themes in the vocal performance? The repetition of the lyrics, being unable to awake from a dream and thus the cycle of sleep and consciousness, which leads to the routine and structure of living— I think the artistic choice to match these lyrics to the musical structure present in the song works especially well considering the structure is absent on the other sides of the album.

Wrapping this section up, an observant reader might have noticed that the title of this text is “5 Cd Players Playing At Once”. And yet, I keep mentioning the four sides or songs in this album. Well, I wish I could organize my writing better, because the paragraph four paragraphs ago segues into the explanation for this.

My Novel Alternative To 4 (or 5) CD Players

Ultra White Violet Light / Sleep - schizophrenia mix

The first time I listened to the album with an attempt to play the tracks simultaneously, I opened up four different browser tabs with a different track or side on each. I tried to synchronize the starting time by starting playback of one, moving to another tab, starting the playback of that tab too, but also moving it forward 5 or so seconds to try and get it to sync up with the first track. My immediate thought after doing this was that it would sound terrible, since I didn’t take the time to get all the tracks on the same time line.

To my surprise, it sounded very good! I remember thinking that the combined version is very unique; its blending of many different aspects, instruments, and styles was something I found interesting. After all, even if you are into experimental or wide ranges of music, when is the last time you heard a cello, let alone a cello alongside a drum kit and guitar. So I liked the album in its simplest form; the constructed “stereo mixdown”.

After spending more time with the album, I decided to do something really cool (at least to me). I made a program in the language Python that takes the four separate tracks with their audio files, chooses a randomized order for them to start in, and a randomized time for how long the next track will come in after the previous one has started, then automatically combines the track into one audio file.

Additionally, I made two more decisions regarding the program. I created (ok, maybe not me, a later paragraph expounds upon this) a function to weigh the random delay start time towards starting earlier. So the order of the tracks are random, they start one after another, but it is more likely they start soon after the last one started, rather than later.

The second decision was to overlay a random segment of Un Peu De Neige Salie over the finished/combined track that was generated randomly. It… works, I guess. To get more into the philosophy of Un Peu De Neige Salie, it is considered “lowercase” music, “an extreme form of ambient minimalism in which very quiet sounds are amplified to extreme levels”.

It bears a certain sense of quiet and humility; it doesn’t demand attention, it must be discovered… It’s the opposite of capital letters—loud things which draw attention to themselves

– Steve Roden on Lowercase music

I figured it would work to create hidden impressions in the mix that were generally inaudible, but could be located with intense focus and chance. I also thought it amusing that I found both of these albums due to that previously mentioned Youtube channel, DEEPHOUSETROOPER.

And all of this programming was actually quite easy, though I feel like a fraud, because I used ChatGPT to help me program. To be fair, I understand programming well, it’s just that I don’t remember all the keywords or functions and looking up all of them would make the project take atleast 5 times longer. So I understand all the code and even had to change some bits, but the heavy lifting was done by AI.

Conclusion

From CDs to AI generated programming

So to conclude, I don’t actually have 5 CD players playing at once. Or any playing. Or any CD players at all. Actually, I don’t own any physical media in regards to music. Never used a record or tape for music. And only a handful of times have I used CDs.

However, I bypassed some of the requirements for listening to the album (4 CD players) with modern technology. What’s more, I was even able to automate and add-on to the experience with the help of programming and AI. And even furthermore, I found these two albums through the use of social media (Youtube).

It is interesting that I should go through both a common and uncommon use of technology in my experiencing of these albums. Finding new music online: very common. Creating a program to randomize the arrangement and mixing of the albums: uncommon.

All of this goes to show that technology intertwines with our experience of art. Being willing to experiment, both in artistic taste and in technological utilization, opens us up to more of the world.