"Untitled Copy"

by Alan Dorin

Untitled Copy is a short electro-acoustique work composed early in 1999. It documents a fascination for modern electronic musical forms, notably the diverse techno genre, and the highly specific sounds this genre employs as cues. These cues enable a listener to grab at familiar elements such as the distinctive 808-Bass Drum pound, or the addictive sqwark of the TB-303, and to therefore place a piece tidily in a little box.

Music of the genre may twist and turn about these markers to test the limits of the recipient, before returning once again to the standard bleeps and booms of the mundane, or it may do nothing at all... but pound and bleep itself (and those who move to it) into oblivion.

This personal addiction to techno in all its forms is being tempered by a more academic interest in music. There are only so many thumps and bleeps this composer can handle! Yet, attempts to create music which lacks the highly structured patterns of electronic dance, result frequently in momentary lapses back into what seems an inescapable basin of attraction.

"Untitled Copy" is a short (1min 30sec) pulsing spectacle punctuated by sporadic outbreaks of sqwark. It makes explicit the composer’s tendency to waiver between the world of music for the head, and that of music which concerns itself purely with the rest of the body (possibly paying no heed to the intellect at all!). ve been performed in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.

Alan Dorin is a new media artist whose background is primarily in algorithmic and procedural computer animation. His research focuses on the field which has come to be known as ‘Artificial Life’, although he prefers to think of himself as a ‘Creative Virtual Biologist’. Alan has completed degrees in applied mathematics, animation and interactive multimedia as well as a PhD in computer science. His animated works have been screened in cinemas, art galleries and at museums around Australia, in the USA and in Europe. Alan’s creative work aims to fuse his interests in biological processes, history and philosophy of science and art, rhythm and things electronic.