Concentric Pleasures: A Brief History of the Glitch

Glitch music isn't as fashionable as it once was, and perhaps that's for the best. For a while there, there was an awful lot of techno-fetishism going on, a lot of ponderous essays and tenuous references to Continental philosophy. Glitch techniques no longer sound as revolutionary as they once did, in part because they've simply been absorbed by pop music. Auto-Tune's synthetic warble is a direct descendant of glitch music's foregrounding of data errors and digital artifacts.

But that also means that it's possible to listen to this stuff with fresh ears. The occasion for these musings is the arrival of a handful of albums from the English duo SND, recorded in the early '00s but unavailable digitally until now. (Rather ironic, when you think about it.)

Still active, recording for Raster Noton and performing at festivals like MUTEK, SND aren't the most famous purveyors of glitch music, perhaps. But they're notable for the extremes to which they took the music; a decade later, I'm actually surprised at how well the music holds up. In any case, the reissues make today the perfect occasion for exploring a sound you don't hear so much these days — and one that listeners who have only recently come to electronic music might have missed entirely.

Read on to explore some highlights for the genre and listen to selected tracks, and discover even more here at Playlist Central. One tip: to really enjoy this stuff, listen to these albums through something better than your built-in laptop speakers. And really crank it up.

Oval: Systemisch
I still remember the day I walked into a record shop and asked the guy at the counter if the speakers were broken, or the record needle was dusty — I don't remember which, actually, but I know that I made a fool out of myself. The record playing was the Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy, an album dripping with distortion, and my 14-year-old brain had never processed anything like it. (I bought it, of course.)

Hearing Oval for the first time was a little like that: here was music that sounded for all the world like skipping CDs — and turned out to have been made by sampling them — that also managed to be profoundly sensual, visceral and moving. Deep stuff, for a music made of scratched surfaces. Sinking into its dub reductions, at least for someone predisposed toward ambient immersion, felt like a kind of emotional scrubbing; here was a loofah for the soul. Remarkably, his 1994 album, Systemisch (Markus Popp's debut album under the Oval moniker, but the first to be widely heard), still sounds like that. And it's not without a sense of humor, either: how else could a track called "The Politics of Digital Audio" become so lush, vibrant, even thrilling? The 1995 follow-up, Diskont, played with similar ideas, but it's more succinct, and also, perhaps, more tender.

SND: Makesnd Cassette
SND were one of the "clicks + cuts" community's most austere artists, in many ways, whittling their sounds down to the merest of pinpricks. But they were also the genre's funkiest proponents, imbuing their sequences with an undeniable sense of the groove: it was like scattering a tin full of ball-bearings across the floor — at the roller-disco. Makesnd Cassette, from 1999, borrows its faded chords from Detroit techno at its most melancholic, and it cribs jerky, jittery rhythms from U.K. garage, which ruled London club culture at the time. But this isn't club music: it's a hushed reduction of dancefloor tropes, disco beats scored for a chorus of beating hearts.

Tetsu Inoue: Psycho Acoustic
The title says it all. This is music that gets into your brain. It's as though Inoue, a Japanese musician long based in New York, had woven his bleeps and pings into a kind of gossamer filament, and threaded it right through your skull, from ear to ear. ("Q-Tip" turns out to be a particularly apt choice of title.) Shimmering arrays of frequencies seem to hang in space, like bees or hummingbirds, before darting away; it's rare that recorded sound feels so spatial, as though you could reach out and grab it, as though it were emanating from a point somewhere behind your ear, or inside your head. Instead of melody, musical phrases suggest the incomprehensible chatter of an alien language. This is playful music, and part of the game entails dancing around the idea of music itself: flirting with the limits of form, teasing out the edge of randomness, but refusing to relinquish a grasp on pattern.

Microstoria: Model 3, Step 2
This duo of Oval's Markus Popp and Mouse on Mars' Jan St. Werner could hardly have chosen a more appropriate name than Microstoria, given their interest in small, baubly sounds. Interestingly, they released an album named _snd in 1996, anticipating the duo SND by several years. Released in 2000, Model 3, Step 2 rolls tiny, shiny blips and pings around like a fistful of quicksilver rivulets. But there's something strangely lyrical about their squawky dronescapes and shortwave hiccups, their oscillating, undulating circuit-board ululations. (Thrill Jockey, the duo's American label, called it "downtempo speedcore" at the time, which is as good as any tag you could care to assign this.) Whatever they're using to make these sounds, the results have less to do with gee-whiz techno-fetishism than with the contemplative scrum of an improviser like Derek Bailey. The very opposite of pretentious, it's warm, funny music — like something meant to be shared around a campfire made of blinking fiber-optic cables.

Fennesz: Black Sea
Probably glitch music's most widely celebrated figure, Austria's Christian Fennesz achieved his status the old-fashioned way: by strapping on an electric guitar. Heck, he even covered Black Sabbath and the Beach Boys — but in his hands, songs by both artists were smeared into a rose-tinted fizz that made My Bloody Valentine sound razor-sharp, in comparison. Fennesz' 2001 album, Endless Summer, established the blueprint for virtually all of his music to follow, rendering squalls of feedback as soft as cotton balls, and weaving hardscrabble string work into a loose, protective thatch. Black Sea, from 2008, offers eight engrossing essays in static, with a newfound lyrical emphasis picked up from the guitarist's collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto.