Marcus Schmickler - Palace Of Marvels [Queered Pitch] download free

On 'Palace of Marvels', Schmickler sets yet another fine example of contemporary computer music after his excellent 'Altars of Science' from 2007. Whereas the latter release was a beautifully pulsating composition filled with raging tones and outbursts of well-crafted sweeps, 'Palace of Marvels' continues Schmickler's phenomenological approach to contemporary music in a different vein. The album is a meditation on the possibilities of the so-called Shepard tone discovered by Roger Shepard in the 1960s, "which creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually rises or descends in pitch yet ultimately seems to get no higher or lower." (as described on http://www.editionsmego.com/release/eMEGO+113V)The website of Editions Mego lifts the veil behind the album's title. Apparently, the 'Palace of Marvels' is a notion that features in an obscure essay of the famous philosopher and mathematician Leibniz, who used the term to describe "a perfect political organization, which is built in such a way that the master of the house is able to hear and see everything that is being said and done in the premises without himself being perceived by his subjects." As is mentioned on the aforementioned website, Leibniz's essay reverberates in Foucault's work on surveillance, governmentality, and his famous discussion of Jeremy Bentham's 'Pantopticon'. A reference to Attali's work on noise and political economy further aligns the Palace of Marvels with more political themes, since "[l]istening in on, ordering, transmitting, and recording noise are at the heart of the modern State." This may not appeal to everyone, but I certainly did not feel this release suffers from theoretical overload or an otherwise masturbatory intellectual preoccupation (though I here should admit my familiarity with the previously mentioned authors). In a variety of pieces, Schmickler augments the Shepard tone with arpeggios and occasionally even rhythmic structures (though nothing straight-forward), and the result is 'mazy' in a profound sense (again invoking more Kafkaesque dimensions of surveillance and control, but I digress). The Shepard tone plays an important role in all of this: it describes a form of 'non-occurence' in terms of the listener's experience. Thus, it may help to raise questions about auditory perception and the socio-political structures that inscribe listeners' experiences. In other words, how are perceiving subjects implicated in political economies that organize (or perhaps 'stratify') experience? To sum up, 'Palace of Marvels' intertwines cognitive studies of the perception of sound with socio-economic dimensions of auditory experiences. For those not interested or otherwise oblivious to such dimensions of the work this needn't be a problem at all: Schmickler's work is an open invitation to research one's own perception of pitch, rhythm, and sound. A remarkable piece of work that deepened my appreciation for this fascinating composer.A final note on the different formats: the vinyl version of 'Palace of Marvels' features a longer version of the track 'Mystery Bouffe' and is thus recommended strongly for those who buy and listen to vinyl. Two thick slabs of vinyl and excellent mastering certainly left me satisfied.