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IMF, "Harlem Electronics"
High-volume, high-velocity, whiplash-inducing noise torn screaming from the guts of a haywire machine. As the Pilgrim Talk website notes, Ian M. Fraser programs his computer to make noise. Once finished, circuitry and code do the rest, no human interaction required. The result is so quick-moving and chaotic that absorbing it in the first four or five listens is about as likely as a windshield absorbing a brick in a hurricane.
 
 
Fraser’s work produces sounds that are thick, gnarled, and biting, as sharp as they are chunky. There’s processed white noise, sizzling distortion, squealing tones, and the kind of chewed up electronic clamor that only a computer could make, like the sound of a million insects eating a screaming animal inside a gasoline-powered wood chipper. And it’s sustained for 15-minutes: one passage after another (it has to be around a hundred in total) separated by sudden shifts in texture and rhythm, all of it rushing by as if set in motion by three megatons of dynamite. The variety (and channel-jumping structure) is impressive; the after effect, relieving. On a Tuesday afternoon when Hillary Clinton courted Henry Kissinger’s approval and Neil deGrasse Tyson defended his dystopian nightmare state of the future, this hornet’s nest of igneous jetsam made everything a hundred times better. Turn Harlem Electronics way up and dig deep into the grain of an electronic furnace.
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