CODEX COOL X
News Feed Study #1 (volume UN)
« Chaises Musicales, Coups de Feu & Farniente »

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«UNholly alliance of freeky jazz, hip crap, frunk and crotte-folk with a juvenile sense of humor ! Heading idiosyncratic rhythms with lame reminders. Developing absurdist groove in a suspicious fluidity. It’s a deliberate plunder of UNwanted sounds with a cheeky performance- montage approach. (✷) Plunderphonic testimony of an UNcertain period»

UNwired June 2020

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It has been a long time since we wanted to devote time to this project that you are going to listen to but we never found out the energy to tackle it. It is always easier to postpone this kind of project, because it is time-consuming and not- for-profit, but also because such a work involves listening to a lot of UNwanted music and therefore you have to be ready for that, it's a real exercise. In short, a slightly crazy challenging project that only the time given by this lockdown allows us today.

March 2020, we have been living in an unprecedented situation on a planetary level and immediately institutes profound changes in the possibilities of practicing our music collectively. Collectively; with other musicians as we like it but also collectively with the public; so all the dates scheduled for the coming months have been cancelled one after the other, and this for all musicians, all over this fckng world, for all café-concerts, halls, festivals. Over. The. World. UNprecedented event in the History of Music.

Everyone revises their strategy. The current situation looks shitty for artists, musicians, speakers, teachers, people of the show as it is impossible to date to consider new meetings and plan future concerts. May be the main form of public representation that we have known and in which we have all, together, participated will disappear, gradually, perhaps even radically due to the virus and let appears new ways to entertain people?

Many are adapting, using the network to the maximum of the possibilities it offers us with a new form that floods Facebook and Instagram; livestream. Nothing new, reven ather old but is democratizing at high speed and on a very large scale. Feel this thing as an assault. Easy culture, easy music, festival every day in your sofa. Also, massive streams of live multi-screen video from band you never heard before appears online, it's a real novelty in a way.

This hyperconnectivity that we are sold so much is finally here, accessible to all; this global pandemic could be the founding event of this mass connection, its advent. We noticed very quickly from the first days of the lockdown that people posted much more online than the days before and especially much more audio content ; posted instantly, wink, clip, or more elaborate videos (including audio as well), and a great deal of so-called "sponsored" artists page, unknown guys, mainly young musicians, virtuoso... Totally UNwanted!
Kind of crazy abyss fed by nice porridge of thoughts, feelings, sensations and then, any feed’s roll / speakers on / accepting everything that passes in front of my eyes a > therefore inside my ears

CODEX COOL X is born from this amazing mash up heard during the first hours of this lockdown. Scrolling "up and down" to hear the first few seconds of each audio clips from my news feed on fb or pages "like" or followed ; ie many pages of international musicians, many pages dedicated to traditional instruments, as well as subscribed pages of groups, media pages, celebrities who relay media pages that media pages still relay... Scrolling them one behind the other, and play with the phone to operate surgically (euh.. no!) on the first bits of sound in zapping mode, with no chosen input and output, very purposeful. These first manual samples alone structure drafts of sound collages, certainly totally unstructured and decomposed but it seems interesting to go further. We started to record these sequences and check in the editor what they look like. We disarticulate the pulses and reversing and engineering each chord, cut up in every directions, replace and invert blocks... Compose in a way, with sounds that are not ours.

As soon as the concept is flattened out, I talk about it to my good friend rlg, and he sends me many cool « tracks », more considered as audio files, that I use here and there in the project, cut/ copy/paste, glued, stretched. We will find sub- dosed bass, stupid beats for scholar breakers, digital scratches and other industrially altered field recordings.

Without any order of preference or appearance, here a non-exhaustive list of the electro-quoted artists we used their sounds posted online (add the vowels of your choice) :
trr x, l prsn, stv gdd, vktr wtn, tn lln, ’d m thf bl, lc vntmgl, stphn crw, cln wbstr, rb swft, sx nn, rcrd d'rlnd, drrl mcdnls, nn whtmn, stfn brtl, pl snn, j ps flp, tptrnc, chrl hntr, mchl rdg, nstrznd nbtn, jck ncklsn, mls dvs, dphn rm, sml l jcksn, cllctf cx, sms brin, rdlph, j bnmss, ndrw lsl... And so many more I can’t remember... As you see, many super-famous musicians with whom we had fun making them play something else.
Besides, if we are friends on fb and you have posted audio online, it is highly likely that you are in these mash ups ! Listen...

All these elements, correlated and extracted from their primary environment, tell a new story that Codex Cool X freeze with other ingredients and work on strings (guitar, bass) arrangements to fluidify and slightly harmonize the whole. The team uses a lot of devices to reproduce sounds with cassettes, vinyls, radio, small homemade electronic machines, drums pads (often to complete the drums that we caught one shot online). We also use part of our collection of field recordings and invented instruments, hybrid, acoustic or amplified, autonomous or manual. We also took advantages of the pandemic offers from Korg and Moog via phone’s apps. In short, we took over everything available and around us in the studio. Not to mention, some beautiful accidental and/or premeditated featurings with ml, nd, sml, mnr, phlp & ntn.

Therefore is a process of automatic and (UN)real- time composition from non-selected audio sources, we insist on this aspect of the project, in the sense that we did not make selection in the sound materials recorded and tried to assemble and use everything. Of course we have been blessed several times by a « holy- successful-random-chance-processing » which offrered first some completely crazy mixes combining urban sounds, human voices (human voices articulating language, tracks) interlinked with micro-seconds feed's roll fragments of various instrumental parts and more brief jolts noise.

You are listening to a human scale collage in its form of massive de(con)struction of the audio information received in order to reinterpret it musically by means of studio and using mixing techniques.
All the artwork are analog paper collages glued during the lockdown as well by ours truly. We feel right to add them in the project.

We do not feel quite right about selling this release; so the « album » is presented on this page to show it exists also physically with all the text above and analog paper collages artwork. Those who had it in their hands got it for free.

Feel wild to spread it far and wide !

Painful to r/hea/r/d ?
Sorry but we found necessary to explain the genesis of this project as well as its process which are not regular for us.

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(✷) Making new music out of previously existing recordings, where any music made by taking one or more existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a new composition. The term was coined by composer John Oswald in 1985 in his essay « Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative » in which first lines are « Musical instruments produce sounds. Composers produce music. Musical instruments reproduce music. Tape recorders, radios, disc players, etc., reproduce sound. »

Codex Cool X
Border Lab, 2020

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Friendly reviewed by :

ED END (Le Colibri Nécrophile)

c'est trop cool ^^
ça me rappelle les découpages de Stock, Hausen & Walkman !
Après même si y a des airs surtout dans la ponctuation et le minisampling en tous cas c'est vraiment bon varié et inspiré !
Cerise sur le gâteau quand c'est dur de trouver un morceau mieux qu'un autre c'est qu'ils ont tous leur intelligence et la pochette n'est pas en reste
bref inspirant que du bonheur !

PETE HOPE (The Box, Exploding Mind, Richard H. Kirk)

Wonderful stuff...
Took me back to when i first heard the John Zorn ‘Godard/Spillane' album!

GORELLAUME

Putain c'est tendu ton album ! je suis pourtant pas une pucelle a ce niveau mais on sent bien le stress ! Quand c'est reussi dans l'agression et que ca exprime bien l'air du temps !!

PIERCE WARNECKE

Great plunderphonic stuff!
Tons of great sounds, nice big sound, but doesn't sound too pretentious (over-produced or edited)… Spontaneous but with a good musical sense!

RODRIGO AMBRIZ

This shit is dope !