My backup earbuds are an aged pair of shitty blue Raycons someone gave to me years ago (probably because they too realized how shitty they are). The audio quality is terrible and whenever you reconnect them too many times or pause whatever you’re playing too often they start cutting out, and when you hold the button down to turn them off the left one makes this horrific lobit yelping noise that would probably burst your eardrum if you had it in your ear. It might be the worst thing I’ve ever heard, so naturally I’m obsessed with it. It’s not just the volume or the piercing frequency register but also the digital brutality of it, overclocked cheap circuitry screaming from its own kind of hell.
Berlin-based artist Diego Behncke plumbs the depths of that hell with Teleplasty: Implex!, a pair of extended recordings performed live using a custom processing system (“consisting of optimal transport–based spectral morphs between recordings of chaotic synthesis via recursive nonlinear feedback”… yeah, sounds like hell to me). It’s the ugliest music he’s released yet; less second updates (2017) on his own Prensa Manual imprint had moments of beauty, and Severe Chronotopic Leakage (2024), though similar in approach, doesn’t lean into fractured fidelity. The code rips spectra to ribbons and whirls them in an algorithmic wind tunnel, whittling the already jagged edges of raw data samples to razor-sharpness. Listen on speakers if you can—the stereo slicing leaves open wounds in the air. “(II / ‘Pt. 8’)”, the newer of the two pieces, adds generated speech to the source soup, resulting in some uncanny moments that sound like robotic mumbling gargling. “Pt. 6” has a narrower textural range and feels almost tactile. Behncke envisions the human operator of his systems as a “regulator” rather than a performer, an intentional restriction that “tries to make flat issues of agency, proficiency, improvisation, or experience.” The key word there is “tries.” The innate constraints and autonomy of the materials certainly limit options, but the regulator must always make conscious decisions—even if they decide not to regulate at all. And on the other end, listeners also must decide who or what is responsible for the things we’re hearing. I, for one, choose to blame Behncke for the brief, ambiguous flashes of old organic friends: dynamic contrast, call and response, visceral intrigue. When it comes to recorded sound, someone is always complicit.
Noise Not Music 