THE ACOUSMATIC OBJECT (EXCERPT) A text written upon hearing M. Rösner's album Post by David Sorfa "The sounds that you can hear on this recorded disc may at times remind you of an instrument but it is clear that most of these noises have been created in an absolutely virtual environment and that what is no longer of interest is the virtuosity of the player but rather the quality of the sound itself. This awareness of the unreality of the sound has resulted in what is often called “microscopic” music. Microscopic in the sense that any individual sound can be examined and contorted at such a level of detail that every hiss and crackle must be assumed to be the result of a direct and conscious manipulation. Nothing sounds like it does by accident. Noises can be produced that would be impossible to make using a real instrument. This close attention to detail of the unreal has created a certain interest in abstract music that is really only kept from chaos, at times, by the insistence of a beat that really has more to do with dance culture than with any respect for the supposed rules of music construction. While listening to these sounds it is possible to dream of the impossible instruments or even creatures that might produce these noises. In this sense, it is possible to think of this recording as acousmatic – a term popularized by Michael Crion in the perhaps spurious field of film studies – and defined as the “sounds one hears without seeing their originating causes”. However, the radical gesture here is to realize that there is no originating cause and that the acousmatic sound creates the fictional possibility of such a cause."
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