Deep City Wanderings : experimental Tape 1987-2022 (cassette)

100 copies edition Quartz Locked tape, artwork by Tina Frank

The second opus of Quartz Locked, a concept band derived from some 25 years of an FM pirate radio (Radio Mulot, France), has just been released. Recorded during the high school years, at the turning point when instead of enrolling at the Fine Arts school like everyone else, one criss-crosses the underground city through the railway tunnels, the drilling sites, the sewer network (where one sees singular blood stars, turds by the billions, all having a human shape), multiplying the antics and the wanderings, the cross-chases with the police or the numerous tramps of the city.
From these turbulent nights we bring back a certain number of heterogeneous treasures: medical containers with a high rate of contamination, reserves of alcohol stolen from the local mafias, audio-visual debris of all kinds, plumbing kits found in construction sites (absurd and magnificent games) but also, pre-computer machines such as highway counters or "beepers" of emergency workers.
By connecting these circuits together - years before the rise of circuit-bending - one experiments with sound sampling and other explorations at the very heart of micro-electronics, i.e. as close as possible to oscillators, clocks and quartz synthesizers. No multitrack is required, just a few tape recorders.
As for the beeper, using the radio network, it opens a field that seems to emanate from the stratosphere and brings back here and there bangs of music, fragmented, suspended in the cosmos, as if passed through a large propeller or through a vortex that cuts the angles.
Several decades later I reassembled these archives and had fun sending the result to a few renowned labels, hence the present release.



1. G.Viederland, Cosmic Pager Multiplex 22:41

2. G.Viederland, Roadside Traffic Signal 21:38