.at/on: Sounds from a Physics Textbook

Despite the dramatic title of this new release from .at/on – “When Satellite Signals Violate into Night Dreams” – it is a remarkably quiet recording.  The sound of any domestic electrical appliance would easily drown it out.  The man responsible for these electronic whispers in Anton Holota, from Kharkov, Ukraine.

A mere 23 years old, he has spent the last six years in the Ukrainian capital, having moved there in order to study physics.  It was during this time at college he became interested in the university radio station and – as a result – developed a penchant for electronic music in particular.

Given his educational background, it was not long before Holota was turning academic, scientific know-how into noise.  His first release was published under a Creative Commons License in 2004; two years later he had enough material and confidence to play live.

The time in between was spent cutting, pasting, and wading through rivers of tape – later to be immortalized in the artwork of his net-releases.

His back catalog is now impressive for someone so young and – thankfully – almost all available for free download from a variety of online sources.  One place where those various, far-flung links have been tidily gathered for us is here.

Asked about the various inspirations behind the release – in fact, the influences lying at the root of all his work – Holota says: “Art, social connections, a lot of different music, urban noise, ‘none music,’ books, dreams, the city, sound design, research sound[s], the forest, past-present-future, traveling, physics, space, architecture, the sky, films, friends, water, fire, the internet, and street art.”  We begin and end with the same terms; somewhere in there is a contrived pun about loops.

We’ll leave it alone.

Brief attention from the Western press has stressed the basic compositional patterns of .at/on’s catalog: “Small pieces of glitch ambient and experimental noise that together make up a complete story…”

Elsewhere another reviewer has spoken of “good glitch and ambient pieces…  Fragmented, emotional audio-atmospheres.  They move back and forth across the dimensions of musical and non-musical harmonies; they include carefully inserted field recordings, which are sometimes interrupted by childish and innocent melodies.  They all echo [one another] and are deformed through the complex possibilities offered by digital sound processing.”

All of this combines to produce one of the most intricate and quietest recordings we’ve heard in a while.  On several occasions, you’ll probably find yourself checking the IPod to see if you’re listening to anything at all!  It all becomes of what you assume to be ambient noise, if not your own thought processes, pure and simple.  As one recent online recording by .at/on said to the music fans just about to click and download… “Enjoy this release, think about why you enjoy it… and then think about why you think that!”

Curiouser and curiouser.

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