It’s been a while since I last saw a SD Card release by Kasuga Records, which seems to be their favourite format. Much of their music is in that glitchy clicks ‘n cuts style. I was thinking about this format and the music, which, oddly enough, are both a bit old by now. My SD card reader no longer seemed to work, my new computer had no SD card slot, and I had to access the music through my field recording device. However, the music may be computer-based, it seems, but this time, it is less about the rhythmic side and more about the ambient quality of the music.

Language is the starting point: “Voice samples of all spoken human languages were first collected from publicly available sources and selected samples transformed into their spectrographic counterparts to decouple them from their wave-based origin. After visually manipulating the time bases and spectrum ranges, this edited material was resynthesised, creating an algorithmically rebuilt version of the original: a new machine-created original or trans-version.” I only vaguely understand what that means, and I would have never guessed it based on hearing these pieces, as whatever voice and language have disappeared from this.

There are 16 pieces on this SD card (in various formats), ranging from 16 seconds to just over five minutes. It has that retro-futurist shine of granular synthesis and time-stretching, the digital residue of ambient music; it’s never all too warm yet most pleasant to hear. It is not too mellow, as there are moments of mild distortion (such as in ‘trans=’, for instance), and there is quite a bit of variation in these pieces. Somehow, it all seems like music of older days, turn-of-the-century digital ambient, which I haven’t heard in quite a while. Very nice.

— Frans de Waard via Vital Weekly