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Deep City Wanderings : experimental Tape 1987​-​2022

by Quartz Locked

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  • Cassette + Digital Album

    a 100 copies edition Quartz Locked tape, artwork by Tina Frank

    The second opus of Quartz Locked, a concept band derived from some 25 years of an FM pirate radio (Radio Mulot, France), has just been released. Recorded during the high school years, at the turning point when instead of enrolling at the Fine Arts school like everyone else, one criss-crosses the underground city through the railway tunnels, the drilling sites, the sewer network (where one sees singular blood stars, turds by the billions, all having a human shape), multiplying the antics and the wanderings, the cross-chases with the police or the numerous tramps of the city.
    From these turbulent nights we bring back a certain number of heterogeneous treasures: medical containers with a high rate of contamination, reserves of alcohol stolen from the local mafias, audio-visual debris of all kinds, plumbing kits found in construction sites (absurd and magnificent games) but also, pre-computer machines such as highway counters or "beepers" of emergency workers.
    By connecting these circuits together - years before the rise of circuit-bending - one experiments with sound sampling and other explorations at the very heart of micro-electronics, i.e. as close as possible to oscillators, clocks and quartz synthesizers. No multitrack is required, just a few tape recorders.
    As for the beeper, using the radio network, it opens a field that seems to emanate from the stratosphere and brings back here and there bangs of music, fragmented, suspended in the cosmos, as if passed through a large propeller or through a vortex that cuts the angles.
    Several decades later I reassembled these archives and had fun sending the result to a few renowned labels, hence the present release.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Deep City Wanderings : experimental Tape 1987-2022 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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  • Full Digital Discography

    Get all 151 staalplaat label releases available on Bandcamp and save 50%.

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of closed enough 2007, Kraft Durch Klang 2015, floating_islands 2004, SALE AWAY-Nantes, Club Moral, Three Music Machines, Through The Occupied Netherlands, RATCHETS & MOTORS, and 143 more. , and , .

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about

The music on Quartz Locked, Deep City Wandering, was sourced from non-musical, professional electronic appliances recorded back in 1987 and preserved on a C-90 cassette until this day. The original sounds were mainly derived from two electronic devices: a hacked, roadside traffic signal data logger, on the one hand, and a physician's pager, on the other.

Wires were soldered to various parts of the data logger's motherboard and connected to a tape recorder's audio inputs, emitting a rich assortment of glitch sounds, static noises and buzzing a-plenty. A physician's pager, smuggled from the local hospital, was similarly hacked and manipulated in order to produce high frequency buzzing noises with striking modulation/demodulation effects. Both devices were eventually plugged together to create additional random interference patterns, while occasional tape manipulation and varispeed effect were also applied during the recording process.

Thus unleashed into the human frequency range, these incredibly raw, ur-electronic sounds seem to pop out of the speakers as if to vindicate their technological origin, in a kind of statement of inhuman music. I tried to preserve the documentary nature of these recordings when finally digitizing and editing the tape in February 2022. In truth, I feel Quartz Loked still challenges the conventions of what we deem 'music' today, and it might even be more appropriate to call it 'non-music'.


(liner notes by Laurent Fairon)

credits

released November 29, 2022

The sound you hear has been sleeping in a shoebox for thirty years before it reaches your ears. I made and recorded it when I was nineteen and still at school. In that period of high school - a period that is now shrouded in a golden aura when in truth it was not - Rimbaud's 'slow and patient disruption of all the senses' was certainly one of the watchwords structuring our wanderings. Under the aegis of a close camaraderie, even the authority of a closed, rebellious, oblivious group, we seemed, rightly or wrongly, to fly above the others, with a passionate interest in art in all its forms: music, literature and the beginnings of philosophy - although in the end, intuitions and abstractions troubled us more than any desire to make a work, frozen in the material, in a set of precise forms. In high school, the others appeared to us as frightened sheep, having already betrayed the childhood to a point of no return, without being capable of reaching adulthood, and if they were not already, they would never be again, unless they made this compromise, this masquerade, a reason for being. As for us, the disregard for any defined project, for any clear direction in life seemed to protect us from having to deal with this purgatory forever.

At that time, so-called 'industrial' music and culture were already at the centre - as one of the flagships of the counterculture - and it goes without saying that such a recording would never have taken place without the exposure to these worlds. I don't want to make a long list, but beyond some major aesthetic shocks with Hafler Trio, Zoviet France or TAGC, Nurse With Wound and Psychic TV, if I think about those years it is the music of Bourbonese Qualk that moves me more than anything else, and the kind of "message" that the music knows how to transmit has for me a force equal to the most intense moments in literature or the history of thought.

This music, and this one in particular, like certain Orphic myths, has the ability to reconstruct an intimate, phantasmagorical city, with its multiple, elastic, interlocking temporalities, in the manner of those cardboard boxes in children's books where the settings are set up, unfolding before our eyes. Such music unravels time itself into large spires, and like a prehistoric fly encased in resin, it makes all the images of that time flow back, interweaving whole sequences: the sunny walks to the record shop, to the garret where we spent the nights, the charm of the old town, the riverbanks, the pure rum sipped in the parks, and, of course, the bites of uncertain love.

I had only recently arrived in this provincial town and in contrast to the atrocious suburbs I had come from, it seemed delicious, almost shrouded in a maternal charm. The whole period was bathed in light. The sweetness of the first springs melted with the melancholy distilled by the omnipresent music, which infused us with a dimension coming like from the unknown. But above all, I remember the room where the present sound exploration was initiated.

Between the cellar and the garden, away from the house, it was the former maid's room, a sort of interzone. Dark, old by its installations with obsolete materials, it had only one window, set with bars, at a height proving that it was not there for the pleasure or the sight. Yet, around the ivy that topped it, the light was always bright, dancing through the branches of the garden trees. The garden, where I never went, was accessible through a large wooden door, barely joined, letting in the dead leaves, the loam debris, the insects with dried-up bodies. It was here that I made my first studies in the visual art field, a small number of abstract canvases, inspired by music and very little by painters: micro-organisms, agitated and phosphorescent, sea pits, nuclear power station turbines, haunted undergrowth, geometric aberrations, all of this together.

It was in this little room, at 8 rue Cuvier, that one evening I brought back the doctor's pager and the white mini home stereo system. It was black, but I say "white" because our friend, in the course of a mystical crisis had covered absolutely everything in his house with white paint - his house, that is, the attic where we also went instead of going to class. In fact, everything that was used for the tape was stolen, but stolen for no specific purpose. In fact, we managed never to do anything that had any purpose. Or rather these purposes had to find their own way into the unconscious.

At night, armed with the worst possible wine, we would criss-cross the city, sometimes through the sewers, get into cars, stay there for a while and come out with small loot, pens, tapes, photos, anything. The police had spotted us but, sensitive or not to the surrealist approach, seemed to have better things to do than to take us in. We entered the sites and left, for example, with plumbing components, a sort of complicated Lego packaged in bags or pretty cardboard boxes. No doubt due to the impact of powerful chemical drugs such as trichloroethylene, these absurd booty and wandering nights had a fascinating appeal.

Later, on the Quai de la Fosse we had spotted a series of burned hooker's bars, probably the result of an internal gang war - as we later learned from the Rennes Legal Police who had ended up arresting us for good. It is from one of his bars, where everything was burnt, melted, that the mini home stereo system, renamed "One Touch Dubbing" according to its own name, comes from, and which will become our faithful servant for a few years. As for the "roadside counter" robbery, it was pure curiosity and to find out what was in these secure boxes, the chain that tied them to the lamp posts had to be broken. As for the pager, it came from a car where we had also found a blank prescriptions' booklet, those of a psychiatrist and neurologist on which we had drawn for years. One of them is a famous post-Cubist "Don Quixote" and his faithful servant, which I particularly like.

Of a consequent size, the roadside counter opened in two in the manner of a small suitcase, equipped with waterproof joints. Inside, two green printed circuits, mounted on spacers, received a large number of integrated circuits. The precision of the soldering and the robustness of the connections left no doubt about the military grade of the workmanship. To explore the secret life of this machine I was content to connect directly and randomly to the legs of the circuits a sound cable cut at its end, connected to the recorder by the line input. Not without astonishment I discovered more or less what I had hoped for: the music of numbers, the rhythms of calculation. Sometimes the sequences came close to bass lines, almost intentional, some of them splendid but so pure, so astonishing, so perfect that it was difficult, paradoxically, to rely on them or to recycle them to make it a propper track : phrases worth by themselves and above all provoking amazement. At other points in the circuit, the machine sent out rapid and dizzying signals, a kind of floor that jumped from one octave to the next, with a very pure, mineral, crystalline sound. And for good reason, the clocks of electronic calculators use quartz stones. To the music of numbers was added the music of angles, transparencies and empty spaces.

The doctor's pager had the ability to enter the waves, although it was not strictly speaking a receiver. But exploring it from the inside it was confronted with oceans of frequencies, ranges of intertwined waves, sometimes even electromagnetic storms. Thus, introduced into the nebula of the pager, one can hear this old organ or "little organ" with trembling or filtered contours, not by a simple effect but through a sort of mathematical equation. The stereo signal in frequency modulation being multiplexed and indexed by a carrier, one can suppose that the pager was reproducing a non-demodulated or partially demodulated version, hence its quite strange shape. So strange that such a trace, captured by a miracle, gives the feeling of having intercepted an extraterrestrial signal but under a reversed process : where it is the human signal, weakened, distant, twilight, which seems to arrive from the bottom of space.

The elements of "music" poping up from time to time arise in a fragmentary way because they were already on the tape and therefore correspond to unerased parts, although at other times they are also mixed with the sounds of the circuits : in truth I don't know exactly how I linked these systems. These fragmentary "musical" parts, which in my personal cosmology, given their speed and strident forms, I have always called "the saws", these fragments therefore come from another piece produced in a group and whose theme was : "Man would like to take revenge but he cannot take revenge, he does not want to take revenge". However, here the piece is disfigured because it has been filtered through the rapid duplication system of the "white stereo system". But then again, we only hear the instrumental version, since the original piece included voices with short readings of Kierkegaard, Artaud, Heidegger, when it wasn't screams, moans and protests. This piece itself already used the road counter as the main soundtrack, but drowned in abundant echo chambers. We didn't quite understand the conceptual virtues proposed by our 'lyricist' but he was persuasive enough that we began to mumble these phrases, with goodwill, assuming that they must have meant something.

This is an opportunity to say a little more about the peculiarity of the intellectual climate that was ours in those years. While I was steeped in "industrial" culture in the broadest sense of the word, which itself was built on the ruins of a still smouldering "punk" period, and furthermore on the materialist foundations of the ideology of May 1968 - and thus, rocked by worlds ranging from Laibach to This Mortal Coil, via This Heat, Legendary Pink Dots or Tuxedomoon, we were going to meet this 'Catholic poet' who fascinated us with his fiery words, inspired by authors such as Léon Bloy, Artaud, Gide or Saint John Perse - to which we can add all the French authors more or less stemming from Christian existentialism current. But above all, this young poet was going to connect us to a whole "ancient", vernacular culture which was going to make a strange mixture with the arcana of industrial culture, and for us who had a sense of the absolute applied to all the elements of life, this opening was going to lead us to intuitions, infinitely enlarged perceptions, not to say indescribable, or to put it bluntly, to the feeling of a universal perception, in the field of art, History of thinking and poetry. This "other" culture ranged from the great classical masters such as Bach, Schumann, Mozart, through mystical or esoteric authors, from literature and all periods, to a musical culture from the seventies which included almost all progressive rock: Yes, King Crimson, Peter Hammill, Van der Graaf Generator. So, a few years later we were going to form a band, between new wave and progressive rock, which ended up being signed to a Swedish label.

At the time this tape was recorded I was working on various small sound studies or experiments under the name G.Viederland - a pseudonym inspired by the discovery of German romanticism. It was Cut-Up, made in real time with the pause button of small portable tape recorders or manipulations on a four-track that we had to borrow each time. Some studies have been lost, like the recording of the bottom of the Loire - the shady river that flows here in Nantes - whose result, according to my memory, was quite disturbing. Also, the present cassette should be credited under the pseudonym G. Viederland: but even if it means to flay the historical truth the name Quartz Locked refers to my first vinyl produced at Warm in 2015 and by association will pay a new tribute to 25 years of illicit activity on the pirate waves of the French FM - the annexation of a public frequency dating back to the year 1997, rue Saint Maur in Paris. The name Quartz Locked refers to the principle of electronic clocks, used to regulate the speed of certain record players and analogue receivers, but also to radio transmission equipment, through PLL technology, the acronym for "Phase-locked loop".

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staalplaat label Amsterdam, Netherlands

staalplaat is an independent record label. Founded in 1982 Amsterdam, the company's mission is to create a sound forum for sound artists, who write and perform new and experimental music.

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