tar xzvf

Being the second release and first full-length album by us, the harsh glitch noise duo "tar xzvf", this release is about technology you may remember 20 years ago. Sound cards, CD burners, speakers, microphones, graphics cards. They created a world that concentrated more and more power in the hands of the individual consumer and as time went on, this power only increased. Some used it for destructive purposes, and others used it to create. Some created destructive things. The entire order of the world was shaped by how this technology was used, and this album is about the intersection of the analog human with the digital world, very abstractly. It is not an easy listen.

The album was made largely with modular synth samples recorded from diig's synth setup, and then they were sequenced by misusing old-school-style sample-based trackers like MilkyTracker, MilkyTrackerX, and FastTracker II Clone, which are limited in their capabilities but which prove time and time again to be the correct tool for the job of creating tar xzvf's noise. The album is at the intersection point where harsh noise, glitch, industrial music, and our own ideas meet.

It's been about a year since the release of tar xzvf's last album "Digital Embryo Placenta", and we put together a 56 minute "harsh glitch noise" release this time, with a little bit more focus on dynamics, but still containing long sections of extremely harsh noise. We have made a limited cassette tape release of 10 copies (hand-made by diig) for our Bandcamp page, which brings our experiments on digital noise-making with trackers into the realm of analog tape. Shipping is cheap in the European Union (it's from France), and more expensive elsewhere. The album was produced using the Polyend Tracker and Renoise, using trackers for a genre which they are not really known to be used for.

The album, at least my input into it, is inspired by extremes in existence, or the seeking of forgetting serenity within to seek out extremes in art, behavior, and other things on the "tails-side" of hedonism in a world that is rapidly becoming more and more digital...for a time, at the very least.

diig drew a cycloptic figure for the cover. I have no idea why he did that, and I'm not going to ask him to find out, so that there is a little mystery to the release and not everything is just spelled right out about it with no room for imagination.

tar xzvf's website has changed to:

As a "harsh glitch noise" duo, tar xzvf doesn't really have a manifesto or set ideology that they wish to express. Although there is much commonality in our thought, the point was not to be really political per se, but tar xzvf does do a few things differently on a musical level. For one, we're a little bit divorced from the aesthetic of uncompromising, masculine brutality found among power electronics and some harsh noise acts, and in our visual presentation we use...pink. At least one of us is not monochromatic, we don't express ourselves in black and white, and we straddle the line between different groups of artists who would find themselves in disagreement with each other.

Yet where things disagree in our art is what could make us a bit dangerous. We are not extreme transgressive edgelords, not academic in our presentation like some experimental music, have some ties to the retro computing and demoscene, and use outdated digital software to make our music. We maintain not so much an "aesthetic of failure" or "corruption" as a tropical cyclone set into motion, as if we flapped our butterfly wings and landed on some hapless city with a storm of old computers displaying strange doings. We aim to bring people together, but how well are you all going to get along?

In our own minds, we once sought to combine ideas that clash, and as such we have much madness to inject into art. The only difference is, that we've lived with the conflicts long enough that using the medium of noise, we can show them in motion. Why do this? I tarballrat can only speak for myself, but I feel much better after creating this noise we make, so this is what I do. I can only hope you get the same gratification from listening.

An artist that feels a little victimized by the own things he finds beautiful, perhaps? I get a sense of him finding beauty in his surroundings, but he still can't get over the pain it causes him. My best guess, anyways.

It's a cacophony in my brain, and noise is the only thing that drowns it out. The sun is taking a cigarette behind the clouds which are reaching for the ground, as if desiring to take us all for a spin. I could imagine being pulled up to the sky, thrown through the mirror-sheen of a mostly 1990s office building, and I would dust myself off and turn down the volume for just a second until I turn my music back on to drown out the wail of beeping horns, tornado sirens, and the cyclone itself. I'll walk down with my ears bleeding through noise, hanging out in the central stairwell where it's most safe listening to something non-ironically loud and abrasive, preferring the hellish cacophony from my earphones to the one outdoors.

We were meant to be storms inside. The air takes us to and fro with daggers at our backs, and fire blisters our feet. Gender is dying, but my identity is a lost cause as I'm swirled about by edgy knives gone dull, flung to and fro trying to establish myself. We know a few parry moves against the foil of the enemy. Let's be clear, also, that everyone is the enemy at some point, just as much as ourselves. We have long hair, or short hair, brown eyes, green eyes, or blue eyes, and they can hide evil like a dome blotting out transgressions of the law in the Wild West of the dark skies. Sometimes our eyes are purple from contact lenses bought on Etsy.

They're daring to make their way to space, I'm reading; a confused school-boy's fantasy of living on Mars could come true if only I weren't so twisted and ashen at the daggers at our backs and I wasn't banished from the heavenly spheres for the hell I raised on Earth.

Taking a break for something more normal. I tried to get into vaporwave; it was glitchy enough, perverse enough, but it scared me far more than any harsh noise album I'd ever encountered. Nothing was creepier than slowly unraveling deception. Assault I can take, murder I can take, but show how assault and murder are interwoven into the razor-thin culture we grew up in? That's truly scary. Something else to listen to, to blast my eardrums into the sky without even trying to hide it.

Marrying the type of mentality that goes with old computer music with the type of mentality that goes into harsh noise music with the type of mentality that goes with glitch probably could bring people together. Yes, let's all join fat with bony hands and frollick in the breeze of a city-scape that chokes us with tendrils of exhaust at the hour of our destruction, or the hour in which we determine to survive at all costs as we're fantasizing of bringing the dreams of the old into the new, and the dreams of the new into the old; of making the digital analog and the analog digital. Until ideology comes up. What will we ever do when ideology comes up...? A fist can only go so far until it hits the acid of a sick or weak stomach...

diig and I liked this album. I bought it for him for Christmas almost 20 days after Christmas (diig being my partner on our noise project, with my name being tarballrat for now).

For those who don't know or like noise music, Merzbow is the most popular noise musician. Some stuff by Merzbow is brilliant; its simply reaching close to the endpoint of a long musical journey to more and more chaotic artforms. Once you reach noise, you can like any sound at all. The birds chirping outside and the wind in the trees make noise music without meaning to. Merzbow is just a continuation of a billions-of-years-old process of the universe making noise. The only difference is that Merzbow is deafeningly loud and abrasive. If humans can live in Svalbard and enjoy it, humans can enjoy listening to noise music.