The Automatics Group (E130) : Entr’acte

The Automatics Group
Summer Mix (Auto 2)
CD (E130)

The information contained in an audio CD can be considered
a waveform describing the movement of your loudspeakers’
cones over time. Using a mathematical process known as a
discrete Fourier transform the same information can be dealt
with as a collection of sine waves of different frequencies and
phases. In this album the phase data is reset, discarding half
the information in the music. What does the half removed
represent? It is difficult to say exactly, but it is related to time
and structural relationships. In most cases you would expect
each event in the original audio to be smeared over the
duration of the transformed track. However, when the process
is applied to music that contains highly repetitive structures,
certain aspects audibly survive the transformation process.

1. Swedish House Mafia/PJ feat Velvet/Roll Deep/
1. Paul Van Dyk/Deepest Blue/Supermode
2. Deadmau5/Mason vs Princess Superstar/Riva Starr/
2. Sash!/Motorcycle/4 Strings/PPK/D.H.T./Tiesto
3. Sonique/Grace/Gouryella
4. Roger Sanchez/Eric Prydz

* Layer of foreground noise due to smearing of all
*frequencies in track over entire duration
* Frequencies become phase-aligned halfway
* through causing central peak
* Central peak surrounded by series of symmetrical
* peaks and dips fading towards beginning and end
* Entirely self-contained
* Aspects of melodies and rhythms retained but
* restructured, with harmonic and rhythmic elements
* fusing beneath noise.

Produced and phase-reset by Theo Burt for
The Automatics Group. Tested by Peter Worth
and Solomon Burt.

First edition of 200 copies

Anthem Classics from Clubland

Roll Deep, In At The Deep End

Cream, Future Dance

The idea of the remix can be a terrible conceit. A meeting of
minds that should yield more than the sum of its parts, more
often a remix is absent-minded tinkering by distracted laptop
musicians, where they suck out their favoured sounds and
make little attempt to engage with the original — an exercise
in point-missing exacerbated by the non-stop hype machine
of online collaborations and cross-promotions. Theo Burt, of
the Music Research Centre, part of York University (whose
history in electronic music runs from Trevor Wishart through
to Mark Fell), and here working under the name The Auto-
matics Group, takes a different, and seemingly more rigorous,
tack. Applying a discrete Fourier transform to Euro-chart
monster choons by the likes of Eric Prydz, Paul Van Dyk and
Deadma5, he ignores the structure (specifically, the ‘phase/
timing data’) to work with just the common frequencies of
the tracks themselves. In other words, this is what you might
call a spectral remix. When the frequencies of these havin’
it bangers are distributed over the length of the whole track,
full-spectrum overload becomes delicately mottled hues.
Just a subtle 4/4 pulse of the original shines through; Tiësto
becomes Deepchord; Swedish House Mafia is turned to GAS.
In truth, it’s hard to sense the differences between the tracks,
with just the tiniest hints of the original remaining, but the
way aggressive consumerist melody is condensed down into
shards of what sounds like granular synthesis is head-spinning.
Previous Theo Burt projects have been equally neat examples
of bringing conceptual rigour to bear on simple pleasures. His
2009 CD-ROM Colour Projections was an elegant and exacting
meeting of video and audio — basic geometric shapes revolv-
ing and transforming in space, the kind of thing you get on
one of those soothing-visuals-for-baby DVDs, where their
angles and lengths are directly tied to oscillator frequencies,
rendering Acidic squeals and sub-bass dives. This album
comes packaged in Entr’acte’s typically fetishistic shrink-
wrapped military-grade plastics, but on the label website
is an alternative visual component to this Fourier-form
remixing. Here, the covers of chart compilations such as
Anthem Classics From Clubland and Cream Future Dance
put through the same process visually, statistically
distributing their hues across over the square surface of
a CD (funnily enough, the results are again rather similar
to GAS). Of course, statisticians can be damn liars, and
the results of any statistical analysis depend on who’s
using them and how. Removing the structure of a piece
of music to try and tap into some notion of ‘pure sounds’
carries its own problematic assumptions. But nonetheless,
Summer Mix is a remix process so elegant it would thrill
the most rigorous mathematician.

Derek Walmsley in The Wire