TÔLE-ACHE (Germany)

tole-ache.bandcamp.com
soundcloud.com/user-562493867-127729718
www.facebook.com/Toleache
www.instagram.com/tole_ache

deathtodynamics.bandcamp.com/album/calibrated-to-zero
dramarecorder.bandcamp.com/album/hate-all-of-you

Tôle-Ache presents work on exasperation music, random sound effects and the psycho-acoustic effects during prolonged listening while the sounds do not evolve or evolve just a little.

The first impression when listening to Tôle-Ache is to believe that the sounds do not change at all. Indeed, while I intensively touch any buttons or while I tune synthesizers, they are subject to a lot of self-changes: random oscillation phenomena when the oscillators heat up and slowly change its fundamental frequency... resulting in waveform contains more or fewer harmonics. Often I use the inputs / outputs to create loops linking several synthesizers in a row, making them dependent on each other. Those methods have a direct effect on audio signal. All this generates random music phenomena.

Most of the time the sounds change slowly throughout the 60 minutes of the song. Sometimes the unplanned effects are fast and surprising, sometimes oppressive and slow. The goal of the 60 minutes of sounds is to create a hypnotic and also psycho-acoustic effect for the ears. Therefore, it is advisable to listen to the tracks on headphones in order to intensify the psycho-acoustic effects.

It is amazing to know that the brain (the cognitive ear) is only able to take into account a maximum of 3 to 4 sounds at the same time. Even if we seem to be able to listen to complex music in detail, it is not so. The brain first listens to the overall sound information and then focuses on the details of a few sounds switching from one to the other. The brain is only taking a few sound-segments into account. Also, the brain can analyse and dissect the detail of a sound to obtain the information on the rhythm, the tone, the timbre and the dis/appearance of new sounds and even if a new ton.

When listening to complex music, the brain (or ear) link to the most predominant sounds and ignores details. Or, it focuses on the detail while it will no longer consider the general character of the music. It will take several replays. But when listening for a very long time or listening one more time the ear will “notice” sounds that they seem to not be there before. Suddenly, the ear focuses on this new acoustic detail that was there from the beginning.

A music piece I consider to be a reference to demonstrate this phenomenon is “Ragnarok Rune” by Boyd Rice. The 12inch version is preferable to the mini-CD one since the CD version is very shorted compared to the infinite loops of the vinyl version. It consists of 3 sound loops of about 1,3 seconds depending of the playing at 33 or 45 rpm. The right and left channels are totally different, which adds tension to the acoustic process. It is surprising that over a very prolonged listening time of more than one hour it is possible to discover new acoustical details which seem to appear suddenly! (1 hour represents about 1980 one single loop!)

My new work as Tôle-Ache is based on this phenomenon, among others. Indeed, Tôle-Ache presents pieces of one hour apparently very little changing music. The directly perceptible modification are first-level sound changes (rhythm, frequency, tone...) The detail-occurrences taken into account by the brain only appear when a prolonged and closely listening take place.

Popular and even classical music skilfully mix rhythms, melodies and lyrics with a relatively perceptible change. It will be needful to listen to more modern and avant garde sound pieces like those from the composers Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich... to discover the absence of change of rhythms and a constancy in tone as well as an absence of melody. Nevertheless, Philip Glass will call with a touch of humor his ´´ 71 creation “music with changing parts”.