Piercing Music

Piercing Music is single one hour long slowly evolving state, more a sculpture than a musical piece. Most of the movement within is stochastic: I made a graphical score: I drew curves defining distributions, and determined the incidence of specific events within given periods of time.

The original recording of the installation from 1993 served as background music for a very sweet and remarkable BDSM related piercing performance, and this is also where the idea to make this CD was born, and the title had its origin.

Piercing Music contains a sample of Wieland Samolak's CD Steady State Music, used by kind permission.

Equipment used: Ensoniq ASR-10 (water transformations, additional samples), Yamaha TG-77, Yamaha SY-77, Roland Juno-6 (synthetic sounds), Alesis Quadraverb (reverb), Opcode/IRCAM Max 2.0 running on a Apple Macintosh Plus (sequencing, global structure). Mixed with a Roland M-160 rack mixer directly to DAT, Friday, May 20 1994.

For the CD re-release in 2003 I decided to leave it as it is without any additional processing.

For the 2021 version available on Bandcamp I added some additional events, created using the original samples running on the original sampler hardware.