Uploaded January 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
If you are reading this, I welcome you to perhaps the most disturbing, unsettling, and downright noisiest composition that I have released for public listening. Many of you will find this unmusical, but for those of you whose curiosity is peaked by this erroneous mesh of sounds, I implore you to read further and try to understand what "Concrete" is all about:
“Concrete” serves as a reimagination and reflection on the Musique Concrete movement, a worldwide musical movement which was started in France and occurred between the late 1930’s through the 1970’s. The movement marked the very first electronically-produced music, of which most compositions consisted of the manipulation and playing of tape through a tape recorder. It is through this movement that techniques such as sequencing, reverse playback, looping, distortion, reverb, delay, phasing, splicing, and more first gained wide-term use. Innovations of electronic music, such as the Moog synthesizer and samples, also find connections within this diverse movement.
In this piece, I tried not only to replicate the methods used from the movement, but to also expand upon them to levels that weren't probable back then. When working with electronic tape machines, it typically would take a composer about a month to produce a minute of music. With GarageBand and its various settings for free-to-use loops, though, the speed at which sounds can be edited is greatly increased, as well as the amount of sounds that can play at once reaches a near infinite amount.
With the creation of “concrete”, I tried to reimagine what the composers of the movement would have done with this new technology, taking inspiration from Luc Ferrari’s composition “Heterozygote”, the works of Henk Badings, and Gyorgy Ligeti’s composition “Artikulation”. “Concrete” is made up of nothing but GarageBand’s Apple Loops, 90% of which contain the word “concrete” (concrete walk, concrete jog, gun shell concrete, etc). The other 10% are loops that add a human element to the piece (French counting and male breathing). The work is made up of 3 movements, each labeled respectfully with their French numbers (un, deux, trois) throughout the duration of the work.
When listening to this piece, you will likely feel displeasure, disgust, fear, and in general weirded out. I highly advise you as the listener to rather focus on the dense texture presented, hear the relation of sounds to one another, and try to piece together a story that these movements attempt to tell.
Enjoy the production.
Song composed in GarageBand
Background art made in Photoshop
Video made in iMovie
If you are reading this, I welcome you to perhaps the most disturbing, unsettling, and downright noisiest composition that I have released for public listening. Many of you will find this unmusical, but for those of you whose curiosity is peaked by this erroneous mesh of sounds, I implore you to read further and try to understand what "Concrete" is all about:
“Concrete” serves as a reimagination and reflection on the Musique Concrete movement, a worldwide musical movement which was started in France and occurred between the late 1930’s through the 1970’s. The movement marked the very first electronically-produced music, of which most compositions consisted of the manipulation and playing of tape through a tape recorder. It is through this movement that techniques such as sequencing, reverse playback, looping, distortion, reverb, delay, phasing, splicing, and more first gained wide-term use. Innovations of electronic music, such as the Moog synthesizer and samples, also find connections within this diverse movement.
In this piece, I tried not only to replicate the methods used from the movement, but to also expand upon them to levels that weren't probable back then. When working with electronic tape machines, it typically would take a composer about a month to produce a minute of music. With GarageBand and its various settings for free-to-use loops, though, the speed at which sounds can be edited is greatly increased, as well as the amount of sounds that can play at once reaches a near infinite amount.
With the creation of “concrete”, I tried to reimagine what the composers of the movement would have done with this new technology, taking inspiration from Luc Ferrari’s composition “Heterozygote”, the works of Henk Badings, and Gyorgy Ligeti’s composition “Artikulation”. “Concrete” is made up of nothing but GarageBand’s Apple Loops, 90% of which contain the word “concrete” (concrete walk, concrete jog, gun shell concrete, etc). The other 10% are loops that add a human element to the piece (French counting and male breathing). The work is made up of 3 movements, each labeled respectfully with their French numbers (un, deux, trois) throughout the duration of the work.
When listening to this piece, you will likely feel displeasure, disgust, fear, and in general weirded out. I highly advise you as the listener to rather focus on the dense texture presented, hear the relation of sounds to one another, and try to piece together a story that these movements attempt to tell.
Enjoy the production.
Song composed in GarageBand
Background art made in Photoshop
Video made in iMovie
