In Thursday’s (8/19) Wall Street Journal, Steve Dollar writes, “At first glance, it looks like a CD with unusual cover art—maybe the guts yanked out of some hi-fi equipment left behind at a stoop sale. Pick up a copy of ‘1-Bit Symphony’ when it goes on sale Tuesday, and inspect more closely. It’s not a CD at all. It’s a simple electronic circuit glued inside a clear plastic jewel-box case, terminating in a headphone jack on the right spine. ‘It isn’t a recording,’ says Tristan Perich, the New York composer who created the device. ‘It’s a performance.’ Mr. Perich, a 28-year-old New Yorker, wrote a five-movement piece of music in programming code and loaded it onto a $1.50 chip, added a lithium battery, an on/off switch, a fast-forward button, and a volume knob and—voila: 40 minutes of 1-bit electronic music, the lowest possible digital representation of audio. He’ll be showing off his creation Friday night at a release party at Roulette, on Greene Street. … The Cantaloupe Records release will be sold for $29, although a cheaper digital download of the music also will be available.”
Posted August 19, 2010
