The release
of "The Crackling" marks the first album-length collaboration between John
Duncan and Max Springer. Recorded by Duncan at The Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center for subatomic particle research in Stanford, California, the project
posed two often contradictory challenges: processing of the rather dry source
recordings in order to increase their aesthetic utility; and maintaining a
coherent relationship with the events which the recordings represent.
The
sounds were first processed digitally in different ways to magnify the characteristic
frequencies naturally present in each sample. As the piece took shape, parts
of it were modulated with the amplitude envelopes of the voices of Max and
John reading poetry; this adds a trace of subtle lyrical quality where no
vocals are actually present. A final step involved time compression of the
entire composition into a three minute introductory piece: an impossibly precise
electronic prelude.
"The
place is full of contradictions: structures built to dwarf and outlast their
creators, designed to generate subatomic events that take place in a time
scale that is experimentally impossible to imagine, using forces and processes
that are hostile or lethal to human life, yet are entirely human-created.
A 'city of the dead' that seems to have an existence of its own with or without
its operators.
For
this work, the electron is understood as a metaphor for the process of life:
isolated, compelled by a system that uses the electron's own energy to force
it into a path that leads at a constantly increasing pace to certain destruction
-- to a point of certain change, of complete resolution and the beginning
of a new process."
