Curd Duca (born 14 March 1955) is an Austrian musician, composer and producer of electronic music.
Duca has played (1982–1991) in the experimental groups "Auch wenn es seltsam klingen mag / even though it may sound strange)","8 ODER 9 / 8 OR 9" and "Skin" (accordion, guitar, vocals, percussion). [1] Starting in 1992, he has been working mainly on solo projects with electronic instruments (analog and digital synthesizers, computer).
Duca is known for his work with audio samples that are altered, cut-up and "re-contextualised" (cut-up artist – Spin Magazine). The audio is taken from analog sources (acoustic instruments, orchestras, vocals, noise, bird calls, et al.) and mostly used without beats. Rhythmic structures are created, originally by loops, more recently by micro-cuts and improvisation with parameters of "granular synthesis". [2] From 1996, Duca's albums were released on the experimental/techno label Mille Plateaux.
20 years later, the German label Magazine rediscovered Duca, releasing his "Waves" trilogy between 2020 and 2022. [3]
Audio signal processing is a subfield of signal processing that is concerned with the electronic manipulation of audio signals. Audio signals are electronic representations of sound waves—longitudinal waves which travel through air, consisting of compressions and rarefactions. The energy contained in audio signals or sound power level is typically measured in decibels. As audio signals may be represented in either digital or analog format, processing may occur in either domain. Analog processors operate directly on the electrical signal, while digital processors operate mathematically on its digital representation.
Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical samples in a continuous sequence. For example, in CD audio, samples are taken 44,100 times per second, each with 16-bit sample depth. Digital audio is also the name for the entire technology of sound recording and reproduction using audio signals that have been encoded in digital form. Following significant advances in digital audio technology during the 1970s and 1980s, it gradually replaced analog audio technology in many areas of audio engineering, record production and telecommunications in the 1990s and 2000s.
Sound can be recorded and stored and played using either digital or analog techniques. Both techniques introduce errors and distortions in the sound, and these methods can be systematically compared. Musicians and listeners have argued over the superiority of digital versus analog sound recordings. Arguments for analog systems include the absence of fundamental error mechanisms which are present in digital audio systems, including aliasing and associated anti-aliasing filter implementation, jitter and quantization noise. Advocates of digital point to the high levels of performance possible with digital audio, including excellent linearity in the audible band and low levels of noise and distortion.
Glitch is a genre of electronic music that emerged in the 1990s which is distinguished by the deliberate use of glitch-based audio media and other sonic artifacts.
Microhouse, buftech or sometimes just minimal, is a subgenre of house music strongly influenced by minimalism and 1990s techno.
Alec Empire is a German experimental electronic musician who is best known as a founding member of the band Atari Teenage Riot, as well as a solo artist, producer and DJ. He has released many albums, EPs and singles, some under aliases, and remixed over seventy tracks for various artists including Björk. He was also the driving force behind the creation of the digital hardcore genre, and founded the record labels Digital Hardcore Recordings and Eat Your Heart Out Records.
In electronics, ring modulation is a signal processing function, an implementation of frequency mixing, in which two signals are combined to yield an output signal. One signal, called the carrier, is typically a sine wave or another simple waveform; the other signal is typically more complicated and is called the input or the modulator signal. A ring modulator is an electronic device for ring modulation. A ring modulator may be used in music synthesizers and as an effects unit.
Mouse on Mars is a German electronic music duo formed in 1993 by Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma. Their music is a blend of electronic genres including IDM, dub, krautrock, breakbeat and ambient, featuring heavy use of organic analog synth and cross-frequency modulation. Their music also features live instrumentation including strings, horns, drums, bass, and guitar.
In digital recording, an audio or video signal is converted into a stream of discrete numbers representing the changes over time in air pressure for audio, or chroma and luminance values for video. This number stream is saved to a storage device. To play back a digital recording, the numbers are retrieved and converted back into their original analog audio or video forms so that they can be heard or seen.
Trans Am is a three-piece American band from Bethesda, Maryland, that was one of the originators of "post-rock" in the mid-1990s. Their work combines elements of Krautrock, heavy metal, hardcore punk, synthpop, electronic music, and folk music. Since their inception, the group has toured with Tortoise, Pan Sonic, The Fucking Champs, and Tool.
Berndt Andreas Tilliander is a Swedish electronica, drone and techno producer who significantly contributed to the evolution of the 'clicks & cuts' genre with his first albums Cliphop (Raster.Noton) and Ljud. He has recorded music under many names and worked with some of Europe's influential electronic music labels. He has been awarded a Swedish Grammy music award in 2005, after two consecutive nominations. He also works with Familjen as a live musician. The song "Arlanda" (from Show, featuring vocals from Jocke Berg of the band Kent.
Ekkehard Ehlers is an artist working in the field of electronic music. In addition to his solo career, he has recorded under the monikers Auch, Betrieb and Ferdinand Fehlers and as a member of the duo Autopoesies and his band März. A BBC reviewer wrote of Ehlers music: Ehlers' music toys with your perceptions a little, opening up a space to think
Thomas Köner is a multimedia artist whose main interest lies in combining visual and auditory experiences. The BBC, in a review of Köner's work in 1997, calls him a "media artist," one who works between installation, sound art, ambient music and as one half of Porter Ricks dub techno. A noted characteristics of Köner's dark ambient style are low drones and static soundscapes evocative of desolate, Arctic places.
Mathis Mootz is a prolific German electronic musician and DJ. Mootz is best known as The Panacea, his drum and bass stage name and main musical project, and as m2, his dark ambient side project and alter-ego.
The history of sound recording - which has progressed in waves, driven by the invention and commercial introduction of new technologies — can be roughly divided into four main periods:
Terre Thaemlitz is a musician, composer, owner of the record label Comatonse Recordings, and a public speaker. Thaemlitz's work critically combines themes of identity politics – including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race – with an ongoing critique of the socio-economics of commercial media production. This diversity of themes is matched by Thaemlitz's wide range of production styles, which include electroacoustic computer music, club-oriented deep house, digital jazz, ambient, and computer-composed neo-expressionist piano solos. Graphic design, photography, illustration, text and video also play a part in Thaemlitz's projects.
Mille Plateaux is a German record label founded in 1994 by Achim Szepanski in Frankfurt, as a sublabel of Force Inc. Music Works. Its releases in the fields of minimal techno, glitch music and other experimental electronic music have a lasting influence.
Low on Ice (The Iceland Sessions) (commonly known as just Low on Ice) is the second solo studio album by German electronic artist Alec Empire, the third of five of his to be released on the Mille Plateaux label. Issued in 1995, Empire recorded the album over three days in August that same year during a tour of Iceland with his band Atari Teenage Riot. Primarily written outdoors in tents and recorded onto analog tapes, the record is noted for its ambient overtone, something not commonly associated with Empire's music.
Pomassl is an electronic sound and recording artist and DJ residing in Vienna, Austria, and is a co-founder of the Austrian Laton experimental techno label.
Charles Cohen (1945-2017) was a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area-based free jazz musician and composer. Creating music since 1971, his music was entirely improvisational and produced solely on a vintage Buchla Music Easel synthesizer, an extremely rare integrated analog performance instrument made by synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla. He has been increasingly recognized for his artistry performing internationally and was one of a handful of musicians who has mastered the Buchla Music Easel. Only twenty-five of the instruments were produced in the early 1970s and only a few have survived. He was also considered a pioneer in synthesizers and performance music. In 2011, Cohen was named a Pew Fellow by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage for his contributions to improvised and electronic music.