Tristan Perich

Tristan Perich is a contemporary composer and sound artist from New York City who focuses on electronic one bit sound.

Tristan Perich's work is inspired by the aesthetic simplicity of math, physics and code. 

Perich composed a series of compositions as well as sound art installations with 1 bit electronics, which Perich describes as being music that never has more than one bit of information being played at any given time. In Denmark he was an artist in residence, where he built a series of sculptures called Interval Studies consisting of large amounts of small speakers all sending out their own frequency. The blending of all of these independent frequencies caused a white noise, or other forms of colored noise. Other works by him include Machine Drawings and 1-bit Video.

MIND THE MACHINE

"This short video documentary, Tristan Perich: Mind the Machine, by Russell Oliver, explores artist and composer Perich’s processes and thoughts on automation, sound, systems, and art. As Perich describes it, he’s interested in “where the physical world around us meets the abstract world of computation and electronics.” Perich speaks throughout, describing his approach to his work, and the video includes a studio tour - his studio being as much an electronics tinkering zone as it is a musician’s home recording space. He’s at work, for example, on a variation on the microtonal wall that consisted of 1,500 small speakers, and the studio is filled with clear plastic boxes to help him manage all his parts. He connects his own minimalist - “bare bones,” in his words - approach to that of his father, the artist Anton Perich. Like his father, Perich has explored an automated drawing machine, images of which open the film. There’s some especially glorious material toward the end in which a chorus of exposed speaker cones accompany pianist Vicky Chow in a live performance."

disquiet.com

ArtWorks

Microtonal Wall

1,500 speakers, each playing a single microtonal frequency, collectively spanning 4 octaves, tuned individually to create an intricately varied continuum of pitch, rendering this twenty-five-foot wall a spectrum of sound. 

“Each listener's exploration of that aural space shapes what they hear, from the totality of white noise (from a distance), to the single frequency of each speaker (up close).” This near-endless variation “opens the scope of the piece to the entire universe, since only from an infinite distance would we be equidistant to each speaker, though in that case they would also have zero volume, and we would be very far from home.”

Tristan Perich

Machine Drawings

The Machine Drawings - pen on paper or walldrawings executed by a custom-built machine - use randomness and order as raw materials within a composition.

I see randomness and order as occupying opposite ends of a continuous spectrum, and I use them to dictate the immediate motion of the pen. Varying levels of randomness - the probability the pen will change direction - produces the difference between straight lines or dense frenetic motion. While the motors' movements are the result of code executed precisely by machine, the final drawings come from the motion of pen on surface, and are wedded to effects from the physical world: the ripple of the string connecting pen to motor, the gradual depletion of ink, the texture of the paper. It is this balance between code and physics that excites me most, since the drawings couldn't be made without the code, and code needs to be realized in the physical world in order to be more than a set of instructions.

Noise Patterns

                                                                  Prototype

Noise Patterns digs into the primitive particles of digital 1-bit audio that has become Perich's signature sound. As with his previous circuit albums, Noise Patterns is not released as a CD or record. Noise Patterns comes as a minimalist matte-black circuit board with a headphone jack in the side. The 6-track album explores how digital noise can be shaped and stressed, from glittering static into the mesmerizing electronic thump of a nightclub. On a technical level, the sonic raw material in Noise Patterns is digital 1-bit noise: a probabilistic density of random oscillations that Perich sequences into rhythmic patterns and layers into textures, pulses, rumbles and beats. 

Notes

Circuit board with headphone jack, packaged in a card tray, housed in a jewel case which includes a poster. The device plays back 32 minutes of low-fi 1-bit electronic music. The final track plays indefinitely until switched off, starting at the point given above. Album gives its length as ∞. 

Matte-black circuit board with surface mount parts. FCC Part 15 compliance text and CE certification screen printed on rear.

Available from Physical Editions.

0.01s

0.01s, Perich's new companion to 1-Bit Symphony, is an impressive synthesis of art and computation in book form, giving a tangible mass to the code behinds its music. Digging even deeper into the basic operations of computation, 0.01s captures the inner workings of 1-Bit Symphony over the first hundredth of a second after it is switched on. In just 0.01 seconds, its processor executes 80,000 computational cycles, enough information to fill a 695-page book with austere tables of numbers and machine language, becoming a visual meditation on the internal mechanics of computation.

1-Bit Symphony

1-Bit Symphony is an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip. Though housed in a CD jewel case, 1-Bit Symphony is not a recording in the traditional sense; it literally "performs" its music live when turned on. A complete electronic circuit - programmed by the artist and assembled by hand - plays the music through a headphone jack mounted into the case itself. 

Notes

Device is a battery-powered circuit with on-switch, volume knob, and button to skip tracks, designed to play through a mounted 1/8" headphone jack and housed in a CD jewel case. Small variations are due to the hand crafting of this piece.

"Movement 5" plays indefinitely until the device is turned off, at the point in time listed above. Album gives its length as ∞. 

Packaged with liner notes, which contain a drawing of the device and its coding.

Limited edition of 5000 numbered copies is now sold out.

1-Bit Music

1-Bit Music probes the foundations of digital sound. An electronic circuit is assembled inside a CD case with a headphone jack on the side. The device plays back 40 minutes of low-fi 1-bit electronic music, the lowest possible digital representation of audio. 

Notes

An electronic circuit is assembled inside a CD case with a headphone jack on the side. The device plays back 40 minutes of low-fi 1-bit electronic music. 

Limited to 1000 copies with numbered insert.

The Cantaloupe Music release of 1-Bit Music and the artist edition are no longer available.