My name is Daisy Butler. I compose electro-acoustic music using
stochastic and noise processes. This method and aesthetic can be
traced back to Dadaism and Futurism, especially the works of Luigi
Russolo and George Antheil, and more recently to the formalized music
of Iannis Xenakis. I am also interested in pseudo-static processes of
the kind explored by LaMonte Young, Alvin Lucier, and Phill Niblock.
I’m a founding member of the Nonexistent Composers’ Collective with my
friend and colleague Mel Cepstral.
I live in Tuscaloosa, Alabama with my family.
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Doilies
(2004)
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Doilies is based on pseudo-brownian motion applied to subtractive
synthesis controls, granular synthesis, and bit-depth modulation.
I present the results as a series of tableaux with more or less
intelligible jump cuts and dissolves which I intend as a specific
analogy to cinema.
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Garden Seen Through a Picket Fence
(2004)
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In Garden Seen Through a Picket Fence
I used fractally-controlled delays to recursively "grow"
nine compositions from a single additive texture made from
noise-filled wavetable oscillators. Each of the nine
compositions is heard on a discrete "channel" which can
only be switched on if an adjacent one is switched off,
like a burst of color seen through successive
gaps in a fence.
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Bath
(2004)
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In Bath, a drum machine sample is refashioned
into a busy texture by "spraying" the sample
through a very small time window in AudioMulch's
Nebuliser contraption. This is accompanied by
some ingratiating, bell-like feedback textures
whose only input was a single click. Making
something out of next to nothing is alchemy;
lingering over the tiniest and most insignificant
sounds is merely composition.
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The Belt
(2004)
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I live in the Bible Belt, where religion co-exists with Southern
culture, and, I suppose, the ridiculous lives down the block from the
sublime. In The Belt, I filtered a sublime additive texture
through a ridiculous battery of finely-controlled multi-tap delays,
generated a "bed", and then re-ran the process with a noise sample.
There is no contrast like accidental contrast.
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Grime
(2005)
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Grime was produced using a process that is roughly the opposite of
noise reduction. I first expanded audio using resampling and multi-tap
delays; then I re-compressed the expanded audio by compositing
multiple time-shifted variants. The result is almost pure noise,
except that the noise-exacerbation process is imperfect, and admits
a steady trickle of unmodified signal.
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Denial of Service
(2006)
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In Denial of Service, I attempt to mask the differences between heterogeneous
granular synthesis techniques, including time compression, buffer underrun simulation,
decimation, sorting random samples from large commercial music collections
acording to psychoacoustic measurements,
and several stages of more typical granular techniques.
The result is used recursively as input into the same process. From an organized,
unified process I hope emerges something with no apparent organizing principle.
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