Piercing Music

The musical material of Piercing Music is derived from a multichannel sound installation I created in 1993. Some of the sounds are processed recordings of water, some are purely synthetic. Piercing Music also contains a sample of Wieland Samolak's CD Steady State Music, used by kind permission.

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, drew curves defining distributions and determine the chance incident 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 piercing performance, and this is also where the idea to make this CD was born, and the title had its origin.

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

However, for the 2021 version now available on Bandcamp I added a few additional layers, all created using the original samples running on the original sampler hardware. And I carried out a quite radical re-mastering, with partially drastic changes in spectral balance.

Covers from top to bottom: 2021 remaster, 1994 original CD, 2003 reissue