Ernie Althoff – Colour Chart There is the danger of a feasible amount of under-appreciation for the culturedness, the cultivated quality of Ernie Althoff’s ‘sound-automata’. The mechanical engineering is perhaps relatively modest at a purely technical level, but highly economical and also esthetically rewarding in terms of design, and in terms of its sonic yield.The notion of such ‘random devices’, left to their own device as they hammer, clutter and scrape away at a variety of objects & textures, can evoke a dionysic ritual of self-loss and catharsis as seems to be more or less what is going on with Joe Jones’ sun-powered automatic orchestra. The comparison with Joe Jones is suggested all the more as Althoff himself has release a cd of sun-powered soundobjects (1999’s Heliosonics). Of course, creating and working with his own automata for about 30 years has surely given room for development. In this case developments have taken a darwinistic flight, leading to a process of evolving evolutionary elegance, both on the part of the mechanics of the automata as well as on the part of the sonic events.First off: what is immediately striking is the pristine quality of the recordings made of the sound-objects which are at the fore on ‘Colour Chart’. There is a sense wherein the act of recording itself is the primary art practiced here – the art of the field-recordist, registrating as ‘objectively’ as possible whatever events are the object of his or her interest. Only in this instance the recordist is also the initiator of the event at hand, as well as the one defining its parameters and co-ordinates. Which is again something completely different as stating that the artist is himself the originator of the sonic produce of said event.An important aspect of the sound-produce is, as mentioned, the apparent simplicity – or factually speaking, the literally brainless capacity – of the event at hand from which it emanates. Presented as “eighteen electrically-powered kinetic music machine solos”, there is nevertheless a highly concentrated, can we even say composed tone to the goings-on. Although not explicitly determined as either composition or improvisation – to which one can add a third option: (mechanical) engineering – it takes not much time with these soundworks to appreciate their meticulously arranged strategies.These strategies by which these pieces are created do not involve any ‘creator’ in the classical sense, nor do they involve any semantic intent. In the end these little sonic biotopes, or soundworlds, each and every one of them, summon not in the first place the question of authorial intent (or lack thereof, etc.), but rather the question of their morphogenesis. What forces collude to exhort the elements into their patterns: gravities; kinetics; kharma?With the generation of these sonified event-generators, the laboratory is turned inside out; and all intent, together with all that appeared contrived and constructed is upon its analysis itself just a flickering of a flame in the fire. What there remains for us to take in is “merely” the aura, the energy, the warmth – the life, then, that the events themself express.(Mark Pauwen)

Ernie Althoff – Colour Chart

There is the danger of a feasible amount of under-appreciation for the culturedness, the cultivated quality of Ernie Althoff’s ‘sound-automata’. The mechanical engineering is perhaps relatively modest at a purely technical level, but highly economical and also esthetically rewarding in terms of design, and in terms of its sonic yield.

The notion of such ‘random devices’, left to their own device as they hammer, clutter and scrape away at a variety of objects & textures, can evoke a dionysic ritual of self-loss and catharsis as seems to be more or less what is going on with Joe Jones’ sun-powered automatic orchestra. The comparison with Joe Jones is suggested all the more as Althoff himself has release a cd of sun-powered soundobjects (1999’s Heliosonics). Of course, creating and working with his own automata for about 30 years has surely given room for development. In this case developments have taken a darwinistic flight, leading to a process of evolving evolutionary elegance, both on the part of the mechanics of the automata as well as on the part of the sonic events.

First off: what is immediately striking is the pristine quality of the recordings made of the sound-objects which are at the fore on ‘Colour Chart’. There is a sense wherein the act of recording itself is the primary art practiced here – the art of the field-recordist, registrating as ‘objectively’ as possible whatever events are the object of his or her interest. Only in this instance the recordist is also the initiator of the event at hand, as well as the one defining its parameters and co-ordinates. Which is again something completely different as stating that the artist is himself the originator of the sonic produce of said event.

An important aspect of the sound-produce is, as mentioned, the apparent simplicity – or factually speaking, the literally brainless capacity – of the event at hand from which it emanates. Presented as “eighteen electrically-powered kinetic music machine solos”, there is nevertheless a highly concentrated, can we even say composed tone to the goings-on. Although not explicitly determined as either composition or improvisation – to which one can add a third option: (mechanical) engineering – it takes not much time with these soundworks to appreciate their meticulously arranged strategies.

These strategies by which these pieces are created do not involve any ‘creator’ in the classical sense, nor do they involve any semantic intent. In the end these little sonic biotopes, or soundworlds, each and every one of them, summon not in the first place the question of authorial intent (or lack thereof, etc.), but rather the question of their morphogenesis. What forces collude to exhort the elements into their patterns: gravities; kinetics; kharma?

With the generation of these sonified event-generators, the laboratory is turned inside out; and all intent, together with all that appeared contrived and constructed is upon its analysis itself just a flickering of a flame in the fire. What there remains for us to take in is “merely” the aura, the energy, the warmth – the life, then, that the events themself express.

(Mark Pauwen)

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