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Tristan Perich: 1-Bit Symphony, Movement 1 (2010)

I am of two minds about the chip music phenomenon.

On the one hand, as any reader of this blog will know, I am an unapologetic partisan of low-bit sound. A raw square wave from a SID chip affects me the way I imagine the swell of a string quartet would have touched the soul of a nineteenth-century Viennese. 

But at the same time, I’m wary of the mood of fetishistic technostalgia that hangs over the whole endeavor. I want to believe that chip music can be something more than the rehashing of unimaginative dance music via “new” Gameboy arrangements to create muzak for the Nintendo generation.

So I was intrigued to learn of the “1-bit music” pioneered by the New York-based composer Tristan Perich. (In digital audio terms, 1-bit means that the sounds are essentially binary—either on or off. More bits mean more “detail,” more possible gradations of volume or timbre.) Perich’s two “albums” consist of CD jewel cases with a battery-powered circuit glued inside. As you can see from the image below, the circuit contains, from left to right, the battery, an on-off switch, the sound-chip, a button to skip through the tracks, a volume knob, and a headphone jack. When the switch is flipped, the chip begins to play.

There’s something undeniably fascinating about seeing the physical components that create the sound—what Perich calls “the transparency of the circuit.” His albums are like digital music boxes: the music is not played back, as in a recording, but “performed” right before your eyes.

But what’s the difference, really, between ones and zeros being read off a disc by a laser and the equivalent information flowing from a chip in one of Perich’s configurations? It seems that in the digital domain, the once-pivotal distinction between the “live” and the recorded is effaced once and for all. Depending on your perspective, you could say that the playback of a recording constitutes a performance, or that the apparent performance is a kind of playback.

The unique format of Perich’s albums has overshadowed the originality of his music. His two “chip” albums differs considerably: 1-Bit Music features 11 relatively short pieces whose style ranges from rather abstract sound-studies to catchy numbers evocative of Commodore 64 soundtracks. 1-Bit Symphony, as befits the title, has five longish movements and a much richer, “orchestrated” sound. Although by no means derivative, the music is heavily influenced by American minimalism—Perich cites Philip Glass as a major influence—and the historical idiom of video game composition.

Perich’s other music, composed for various combinations of 1-bit sound and conventional instruments, I find less compelling, although the timbral effect is sometimes quite stunning. More interesting is his Interval Studies, a recent sound installation based on microtonal clusters formed by panels dotted with tiny loudspeakers, each emitting a single tone.

August 05, 2011, 11:13am