Cane-Ar Obsoletronestra :: Obsoletronics
Obsoletronics is a collaborative project between new media musicians, composers and programmers Bob Bellerue, Jesse Gilbert, and Brian Crabtree as a way to address the technological waste that accompanies rapid progress, with an interest in exploring folk-level forms of digital sonic expression (in the use of freely available knowledge and technology), the challenge of working on the edge between data and audio signals, circumventing the limitations of hardware.
The project originally began as a “thrift store computer band”, the Cane-Ar Obsoletronestra. We use dead and obsolete computers for sound generation and processing: using audio leads to tap the circuit board of a live computer; 8-bit DOS audio software for real-time synthesis; the Mac OS 7.6 boot chime layered upon itself. Networked systems stream audio to create resonant loops between distant locations on the internet, and the data transfers involved are tapped and plugged into a mixer that feeds it into the encoder.
As musicians and composers, our primary interest is in the sonic qualities of the equipment and software, and our aesthetic choices more often involve harnessing energy patterns and avoiding sample-based sequential music. The means of generating sound involve harnessing physical energy: circuit-bending; circuit-probing; real-time low-fidelity software using live input; audio data compression and error-correction technologies that work based on models of hearing; data mining.
We are currently expanding our scope to the repurposing of any sort of found technology (equipment gathered at thrift stores, salvage / junk yards and trash dumps), with a preference for communication, networking, and computing devices, modified in any way necessary with commonly available materials. We approach it as a site-specific process, to gather technology from the region of the presenting site and listen to its collective juices. With network streaming we can also connect with remote performance sites, and have multiple regions collaborating on a common audio signal.
