Tristan Perich - Noise Patterns (2016)

The last two major releases from New York composer, designer, and programmer Tristan Perich only really “ended” only when the three-volt lithium watch battery powering them gave out. In 2010, Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony connected a silver cell, an ON/OFF switch, a fast-forward button, a volume knob, an eight-inch audio jack, and a one-bit chip with beautiful arcs of black wire, all permanently affixed inside a transparent CD case.

Flip the switch, and the chip generated five occasionally transcendent pre-arranged movements, music that hinted at Philip Glass composing for a RadioShack centennial. Forget to push the switch back to the left, though, and “Movement 5” would never stop, its overloaded drone suggesting a broken church organ whose sound stretched to the sky, forever and ever. Perich’s new Noise Patterns—which applies the same high design to the sounds of, say, Merzbow rather than the masters of ecstatic minimalism—turns the same infinite trick: Keep your headphones plugged in and never kill the switch, and “Section 6” will eternally wash you in a flood of pulsating static, as if you’ve been integrated into and obliterated by the simple circuit itself.

This is, of course, Perich’s clever approximation of a classic vinyl feature—“the locked groove,” or a short snippet of music at the end of a record’s side that repeats until the needle is lifted. In 2007, Perich debuted with 1-Bit Music, the first self-described “circuit album,” a colorful and less seemly tangle of wires that played 11 tracks from inside a CD case. Questions of categorization appear paramount to Perich; his triptych of related releases—1-Bit Music, 1-Bit Symphony, and Noise Patterns—tease the binary between “album” and “instrument” in ways that the similar Buddha Machine or even Brian Eno’s Bloom could not.

In an era when our sense of the album is loosening, or where Kanye West can continually tweak a playlist and still call it by the same name, Perich moves in the opposite direction. He permanently fixes his parts to one platform (in the case of Noise Patterns, a sixteen square-inch black matte circuit board, cradled for convenience in a cardboard-lined CD case) and completely exposes the innards and limitations of his operation. You can control the output, but only to a limited extent; each moment has been meticulously built, evidenced by the printout of Perich’s code that accompanies the board. Like its predecessor, Noise Patterns makes and contains the sound all at once. It is programmed, but its very physical nature provides the illusion that it is somehow playable, too. This is defiantly offline media that still feels mutable.

Even without its itinerant conceptual or engineering trappings, Noise Patterns is a fascinating record that produces a lot of sound with a very small source. Perich never peels the glitch-and-hiss mayhem too far from the meter, so that even the harshest passages here pulse and throb with interesting rhythms. He’s constantly splitting or slowing them, quickening or collapsing them. At one point, “Section 3” hits a deep but brief four-on-floor groove before pivoting between short rests and big blasts of static in separate channels; it feels a little like an EDM drop, a swollen reservoir of sound suddenly being emptied across a still scene below. “Section 1” suggests the ever-expanding, ever-contracting pulse music of Steve Reich, rewritten for a dystopian world of strobe lights and antiquated electronics. “Section 5” recalls the colossal industrial quakes of Author & Punisher, another inventor and musician that has recently used customized objects to test boundaries between the player and the played, the input and the output.

For the last decade, Perich has used very small objects to pose very big questions about art, how it’s made, and how it’s perceived. His one-bit obsession has spawned performances or recordings with percussion duos and pianos, string quartets and accordion quintets, chamber ensembles and viola trios. At a time when an overabundance of sounds, processors, sequencers, and effects can be harnessed with a single cell phone, let alone an actual laptop, Perich has elected to see how much musical versatility and adaptability he can get from a simple bit attached to a circuit board, an almost laughably rudimentary premise. Noise Patterns is cacophonous proof that he’s not finished turning such demanding ideas into surprisingly delightful, diverse music.