Scott Arford’s new release, Solid State Sex, on Low Impedence, is packaged as a double disc with Francisco Lopez’s Solid State Flesh. Lopez’s piece, a 73-minute track of low frequency trembling that rises and falls in volume, sets off Arford’s shorter, more composed explorations in the nature of static. These artists inhabit the international academic-noise milieu, a genre so abstract that it seems monolithic, so placing them side-by-side brings valuable variation to the fore.

Like Lopez, Arford is an academic, but in art rather than entomology. His Static Rooms series of installations draws aural static from color-field video compositions. Arford describes the experience as synesthetic: viewers hear color and see sound. Another piece, the conceptual Total Static Takeover declares “that from this day forward, April 13, 2003, all instances in which the phenomena of VIDEO STATIC occurs shall be constituted as a screening, partial screening, or instance of the video TOTAL STATIC TAKEOVER.‿

Arford describes static as “paradoxically at once infinitely in motion, yet fundamentally unchanging;‿ Solid State Sex can be heard as a demonstration of this duality. Its six component pieces, recorded live from 2001-02, are united by static’s grainy, fuzzy quickness, yet they vary in overall effect and composition. Pieces like “Aluminum Airway‿ incorporate calm washes of high-frequency shimmer. The following track, “Point Loads and Surfaces,‿ diverges extremely with spaced-out, rhythmic static taps, ranging from popcorn kernels to gunshots. It’s the most beautiful piece on the album.

After the playfulness of “Point Loads and Surfaces,‿ we move on to “Dirty Power,‿ a grumbling beastly rant, like grizzly bears killing under northern lights. In three consecutive tracks, Arford has sculpted lowly static into three discrete moods.

Solid State Sex isn’t synesthetic like Static Rooms, but it conjures flickering mental images through noise. This quality is cast in relief by Lopez’s Solid State Flesh, which decontextualizes sounds taken from nature. Bundled together, the projects of these two artists are diametrically opposed. Arford is interested in sounds generated by visuals and visuals generated by sounds, a duality that reaches its apotheosis in synesthesia and is symbolized by static. Lopez seeks pure sound, one medium unpolluted by any other.

pieces were originally recorded back in 2002 and had been slated for release by a couple of different labels, until Low Impedence had the sense to finally just do it. Curiously enough, this is one of several releases to come pouring out of Arford’s 7hz studios after a couple of years of silence. Electricity appears to the source material and subject matter for the two composers on Solid State Flesh & Solid State Sex. The latter is the work of Mr. Arford who has always had a penchant for hard, blistered noises and cacophonic feedback squallor; and those sounds are heavily featured here punctuating the deadened buzz of smoldering electricity. It’s hard to think of this as being sexy music or even sexual music given the electrocutionist throb of Arford’s sounds, thus lending to plenty of transgressive readings if you’re so inclined. On the slightly more voluptuous Solid State Flesh, Lopez expands the monotone of 60 cycle hums and the hissing buzz of electrical static through his signature compositional strategy of slow-burning tumult which abruptly halt and annouce a prolonged passage of inactivity. Unlike some of his Belle Confusion pieces, Solid State Flesh adds a considerable menace to his self-professed absolute concrete, but nevertheless is very well done and an excellent companion to Arford’s work.

One typically longish piece from López (would that Jem Finer had not settled upon the 1000-year recording first) recorded in Montréal in 2004, and seven shorter pieces from Arford recorded at the old 7Hz warehouse space in San Francisco in 2001 and 2002. The sound level on the López disc is slightly more aggressive, an immediate eardrumming rumble instead of the slow building, hissy fits of previous outings. Impossible to identify the sound source without press release or scorecard. It matures into what could be described as an electrical tickle, and when you close your eyes – as López recommends you do when listening to his records – all sorts of things pop out from beneath the soft spots. Heat waves rising from dusty dead lakebeds, the swishing of a gila monster’s tail in the shade of a lightning-struck cactus, and now a sandstorm, sudden dropoff and gentle wind pumping through the speakers from the sheer physical force of the volume information peeling off the CD. It continues like that for a little while, journeying into a valley made entirely of bees that grow and mutate into towering pylons marching across your hemispheres. When something vaguely resembling a series of musical tones appears, it’s a beautiful shock – like getting rear-ended on a California highway by a new Mustang when you’re driving an old pickup. It all bottoms out in the resonance of a rusty metal bucket before ascending again, more shortwave stations than there are stars in heaven. Arford’s disc begins with a drone not quite so forceful as López’s, but that changes once you realise that it’s moving from speaker to speaker AND WE’RE OFF! THEY’RE RUNNING! Static Effect moving ahead of the pack in the second lane from the inside followed by Bolshevik Hum in lane three and Getmethefuckoutofhere Wisconsin in lane four it’s Static Effect leading the pack Static Effect in the lead… It races on like that for a bit. Each of the six tracks has its own identity and style of movement: mysterious whispers, cooking bacon in the nude, the purring of a robot cat, your daily grind, and YES it sounds like someone’s breaking into your house. Better run and check.–DC

This double CD pairs two of the most eminent manipulators of expansions and contractions born from a competent work on electroacoustic derivations. In “SSF”, Lopez explores a vast dynamic range, his phenomenal experience on the thresholds of audibility partially put aside in favour of a painstaking process of impressive modifications and overwhelming energies whose effect is comparable to a separation of your senses. Torrents of electricity, pumping lows and shattering vibrations take this music to the highest level of magnitude, putting Lopez’s work in the same rank of John Duncan’s and Daniel Menche’s best; this is one of the most complete compositions I’ve heard from Francisco, his controlled disorder also being a powerful means of self-introspection. Arford’s “SSS” fuses more concrete sources with equally awesome low-frequency engineering; as opposed to his Spanish counterpart, Scott’s scenarios change abruptly, often surprisingly after our psyche is lulled during long moments of semi-displacement. Arford places his morphing sounds in an evolving framework of resonant interferences, hisses and utterances that have “anxiousness” spelled all over the place. Getting the brain and the auricular membranes used to this shifting bubbling takes its time – but once you learn going with this overloaded flow, the reward in terms of nerve power is a sure thing.

Francisco López and Scott Arford bring considerable reputations to this daunting opus from the Greek label Low Impedance. López has amassed a catalog of more than 140 minimal electroacoustic sound works (issued on 100 record labels) which collectively document his attempt to “reach an ideal of absolute concrète music.” A leading new media arts figure in the San Francisco Bay Area and instructor at the California College of Arts, Arford has created numerous sound and video works and was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica. On their respective discs, López and Scott Arford transform electrical flow into alternately quiet and sometimes humungous slabs of steely, prickly sound.

One might expect a piece of 73-minute duration to exhaust one’s patience yet “Solid State Flesh,” López’s methodically modulated monolith, remains engrossing throughout. Though segues from one episode to another transpire slowly, López never succumbs to cheap theatrics (e.g., bludgeoning the listener with sudden blasts) but assumes the listener will be patient enough to stay with the piece throughout its unfolding. Imagine the sonic center of a maelstrom and you’ll have some idea of the relentless swirling mass of thrum López generates in the opening section when a detonation transforms soft rumbles and ripples into a seething tornado. The piece intermittently drops to near-silent levels before incrementally building to episodes of churning violence at the 27-minute mark and buzzing noise and thrum after 53 minutes. Eventually deflating to industrial hum that echoes and fades to oblivion, “Solid State Flesh” impresses as a masterful exercise in controlled sound manipulation.

Formally split into six separately titled pieces, Arford’s “Solid State Sex” might appear to be the more episodic of the two discs but Lopez’s is equally so, despite it having a single title. There is, however, a noticeable difference in mood with Arford’s material the more aggressive of the two. The unsettling “Discharge,” for example, puts the listener on edge immediately with grinding drones of rattlesnake thrum and knife-edged ruptures of metallic sound, even if a calmer mood prevails during “Strange Attractor” with its quieter gurgles and soft rumbles. “Aluminum Airway” keeps up a seething beehive of activity throughout its twelve minutes while sparse streams of microwave pops grow into tsunami of screeching static in “Point Loads and Surfaces.” A veritable alarm announces the onset of “CME (Coronal Mass Ejection)” before a deafening ringing drone gradually rises to nightmarish and harrowing levels.

The precise relationship between the “Solid State Flesh” and “Solid State Sex” titles and the aural content is obscure but what’s inarguably clear is the uncompromising and challenging character of the artists’ sound design.