A CD-length album comprising two 30-minute lo-fi chunks of systems music largely modelled on George Aperghis, utilising the ZX Spectrum's beeper and AY-chip as well as household musical equipment such as rain sticks, headless recorders, alarm clocks and electronic organs. In between the chunks lie two shorter and cleaner studio tape pieces 'to clean the ears' which are largely satirical, nowhere near as structured. The over-riding principle is the punk 'do it yourself' ethic.
Estuary Erotica is a piece in two natures. Secondly the short interludes "Jane Saw Everything" and "Jane Saw Us Again", which are really subversions of 'sophisticated' computer music, which is just so damned well-behaved!!! Here the pieces, especially the latter, seek to bring a crudity and aggression to the domain normally populated (or so I thought in the 90s anyway) by washes of sound, polite bells and whistly-squealy soundscapes. Anyhow that's the second element and overall it just serves to remind the listener what 'normal' quality sound is like. For the most part, the primary nature of the piece is contained in the two 30-minute chunks of "Estuary Erotica". These were recorded lo-fi in 1994 using materials available at hand. Everything was delivered solo in real time, which is why some of the materials are somewhat systematic. I'm not a believer in "loops" as a whole, but this is as close as I've come to them really. There's a large role played by the ZX Spectrum, which at the time was my main computer (it was capable of doing serial permutations and low-res sampling so it did the trick - it didn't really do sequencing, which is why the automated parts here aren't very sequency (though ironically a lot of pieces made USING sequencers STILL contain loops!!!)). The ZX Spectrum was quite interesting here - at certain times it plays samples at different rates, thus giving the effect of pitch-shift along an almost normally-tuned scale (sounds quite like early 90s UK chart-music "rave", which was presumably a derivation of some more sensible european techno music but I wasn't into that then (still aren't)). At other times the Spectrum delivers longer samples in contracting loops, which works as follows: the machine-code routine which plays the sample reads direct from RAM, with a start address and an end address. These are just moved one byte higher (for start) and one byte lower (for end), which, in the very crude sampling of the Spectrum, shortens the sample (and also changes its nature). For the glissandoey section, the RAM was poked with bytes of ascending/descending numbers where the direction changed at random. These were then contracted in the way illustrated above. For the more mechanical-sounding section, the screen display was loaded with sample data from tape and then changed GRAPHICALLY - obviously due to the way the Spectrum handles the video array* the effect of drawing say a vertical line will be unpredictable and overall the effect of graphical manipulation will be a dirtying/distortion of the sample. These were then contracted too. There's the usual headless recorder things going on, some Yamaha DX21 improvisation (which I think probably MAY have used a primitive sequencer with non-standard floppy disks - can't remember) and some organ improvisation (a German 'Mark' organ - not much info available but they were self-assembly machines built in the 70s and 80s I think.)
Overall the long "Estuary" chunks are very dirty, very lo-fi and quite challenging. The aggressive studio chunks (much shorter and made with "modern" mid-90s equipment (Apple Powermac, Yamaha SY99, Korg Sampler, proper mixing desk, etc.) are in a sense just as lo-fi in their attitude but the effect is one of great relief as the ear feels released from the gritty slimy nasty textures of the main chunks.
There's little genuinely-structured "chance" material in this album but plenty of the decisions made were completely arbitrary, which is sort of similar in the final analysis. (Arbitrary in a fairly meaningless sense, not arbitrary but justifiable! Quite often the random movements of my eye would determine which piece of equipment would be picked up and "used".)
The best way to listen to this is probably on "shuffle" such that you don't stop until you've heard all four parts. This may include a strong sense of dismay as "Estuary Erotica Side 2" plays for the third or fourth time!!!!! :-)
* (normal RAM but laid out in odd patterns, each byte representing 8 colour-independent pixels, the screen divided into three regions and then within those regions the pixels are filled line-by-line to fit with the colour-regions (this is complicated and illogical I know - there'll be better descriptions on the net no dout) so that what you see with sequential memory-locations is the 8 pixels of the top row of each colour-region within the top slice of the screen, then the 8 pixels of the next row, etc. until it fills the whole top slice in like venetian blinds... then when all three slices are filled, the colour-regions (blocks of 8x8 pixels) are filled in sequence for the whole screen)
![[item image]](http://ia600301.us.archive.org/15/items/GregFoxEstuaryErotica/estuarybanner.gif?cnt=0 "[item image]")
![[help]](/images/question.gif "[help]")
)![[Attribution-NonCommercial]](http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights20.gif "[Attribution-NonCommercial]")
