Mark Robinson - Taste EP
(Teenbeat)
Mark Robinson has balls the size of small farm animals. As far as I know,
no one has ever made a record like this, and as far as I can tell, no one
should ever attempt to do so again. But it had to be tried, and Mark
Robinson went ahead and did so.
This EP, the first in a series of four, is made entirely of voice and cut-up
sine waves (covering the full range of CD-recordable signals and then
some--screw you Harry Nyquist). If you never took a science or math course
after ninth grade, a sine wave is a pure tone, sort of like an Emergency
Broadcast System warning tone or the sound of your smoke detector. Yeah,
and Mark made some songs out of that; can you believe it?
Such tones are too piercing and irritating if held for any substantial
duration, so Robinson has done the only thing he can do, cut up the tones
into short bursts. As a result, much of what he creates is a lot like a
drum machine, although he has experimented with his software enough not to
limit himself to that.
The four songs here are very different. The first is basically just a drum
machine composition made from sine waves. The second is more similar to an
Olympic Death Squad song, with just a simple sine beat, emphasizing the single
phrase vocals (oohhhh, harmonics). The third is merely a scale of sine waves,
an experiment on the compact disc's ability to produce tones from low
pitched to high. The fourth song is the most like an actual song, where the
waves create something more than just beats.
Back in college, I had a science teacher once ask if anyone had heard music
made from pure sine waves. No one, including the professor, had; the professor
remarking that it was probably for the best as such a thing would be pretty
hard to listen to. Now it has been done, and, yes, it is pretty hard to
listen to. This is worth hearing just for the novelty and comedy of the
"music." However, you won't want to hear it twice.
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