Hunter Brown

  • Stoppages Vol. 1 [∞] - Liner Notes, Dominic Coles
  • ◦ "In Hunter’s Stoppages, a meticulous and raw collection of works, where can we locate his particular wanting? Behind the technological and computational rigor, 'the austere aesthetic, and the cold, caustic, digital sounds is something much softer, much warmer. At the core of these pieces is a desire that things be different – that the world as shaped by our malicious impulses, our greed, our insecurity, and our violent lust for acknowledgment were to be re-formed. If you know Hunter then this begins making quite a bit of sense: beneath the surface is something extremely gentle. Does Stoppages suggest an action towards the transformed world and way of being that the work so desires? I’m not sure I have an answer yet, but my instinct tells me it has something to do with the rupture, of breaking things apart and letting our desire leak out. Hunter does the work necessary to cause the first crack - it’s up to us to place our ears against the hole and listen as the gap widens."

  • Stoppages Vol. 1 [∞] - Liner Notes, Michelle Lou
  • ◦ "Although Hunter Brown’s Stoppages considers an aesthetics of failure as a starting point, encapsulating the points made above, this project seems to orbit its own space outside of other post-digital glitch music practices. The politics of this piece may center around control, but rather than merely exploiting system failure and bringing to our attention the fallible nature of digital technology as still very human-based, this album expansively allows us to dream."

  • Stoppages Vol. 1 [∞] - Boring Like A Drill
  • ◦ "Brown picks up David Tudor’s ideas on the generation and transmission of electronic sound and runs with them into new digital territory, pushing the idea of synthesis and glitching further than most... The results are alarming, particularly when the system flatlines and your hi-fi’s level meters are pegged by silence. Apparently unedited, each piece is defined by the amount of time it took before the programme crashed, creating inexplicably arbitrary structures of sound and silence. When the frequency spectrum looks like this, you know it’s uncompromising."

  • PP-08: Si Distributions, Duo w/ Eric Wong - Boring Like A Drill
  • ◦ "The two of them cook up a pair of severe, spatialised noise studies that keep turning aggressive, but the harshness is tamed and sculpted by responding to the acoustic dynamics of the apartment, using the placement of their bluetooth monitors as EQ to exert stern but fair authority over brittle electronic sounds."

  • PP-08: Si Distributions, Duo w/ Eric Wong - Peter Margasak
  • ◦ "Check out “SI Distribution 1,” a wonderfully tactile mélange of white noise, sine tones, glitchy smears and disruptions, industrial hums and rumbles, and diffuse atmospheric drift."

  • Party Perfect!!! - Noise Not Music (Favorite Labels of 2023)
  • ◦ "Party Perfect!!! really hit stride this year with releases that exemplify their focus on radical computer music. Technical Reserve’s Personal Watercraft presents the winning combination of TJ Borden and Other Plastics, Envelope Demon / For David Stockard digs deep into the conceptual side of things, Stoppages Vol. 1 [∞] makes process composition fun for the whole family."

  • PP-01: almost leisure, Other Plastics - Harmonic Series
  • ◦ "An aesthetic line is tied between computer music and field recording, and they’re held close enough to make the difference feel insignificant. It could be argued that what’s displayed here is that digital sounds are alive, or that real sounds are artificial, or that both share the same murky middle-territory. Either way, the music present on almost leisure is as beautiful as it is hypnotic."

  • PP-01: almost leisure, Other Plastics - Noise Not Music
  • ◦ "almost leisure has a much more defined thesis than the duo’s traditionally improvised debut, its sprawling sound-map of decontextualized conversation and spatial wormholes evoking the uncanny humor and illuminations of Network Glass’s Twitch user anthropology. As is probably clear by now, any of these could easily hold its own as a distinct release, but I think PP-01 is greater than just the sum of its parts."

  • PP-01: almost leisure, Other Plastics - Noise Not Music (Favorite Multi-Artist Compilations of 2022)
  • ◦ "We may have lost the great Peter Rehberg last year, but radical computer music is nonetheless alive and well, evidenced by exciting new collectives and labels like Party Perfect!!!."

  • PP-01: almost leisure, Other Plastics - Boring Like A Drill

  • Technical Reserve, Live in Joshua Tree - New Classical LA
  • ◦ "A trio of two laptops & one pedaled-up cello, Hunter Brown, Dominic Coles, and TJ Borden threw an eclectic & original vernacular at us – one that no one was ready for... Around midnight, it seemed as if we were launched into an immersive historical survey, illustrated by paradoxically paired genres of structureless free jazz and rigid serialism. Through jurassic growls, explosive feedback, silences of space, and instruments of war, the trio suggested that what makes us unique as human beings is our unwavering curiosity. At this point, the outdoor classroom that is the quaint courtyard of The Palms were now littered with stimulated, engaged minds, with Bach, Coltrane, and Stockhausen acting as our instructors on behalf of the trio sitting in front of us."

  • PP-02: Personal Watercraft, Technical Reserve - Peter Margasak
  • ◦ "Experimental music is about trying shit and seeing what happens. Yet there’s plenty of that experimenting happening with Borden, but his cello-and-electronics improvisations, fed into and manipulated by the rigs (or whatever what they’re using is called) of Brown and Coles, present a genuine interplay between the musicians, and for me that almost always feels more human and risky. Most of the pieces are bite-sized tremors that writhe and sizzle before going silent, but there are some more, uh, measured excursions... The music often moves at breakneck pace, but the interactive sensibility is never lost. Definitely one of the most convincing free improv sessions with real-time processing I’ve heard since discovering Sam Pluta years ago."

  • PP-02: Personal Watercraft, Technical Reserve - Endaural
  • ◦ "You've got Dominic Coles and Hunter Brown on computers, and TJ Borden on cello and electronics warping the instrument into a shape that fits in perfectly with the fully synthetic sounds, with a dry negative space surrounding all the instruments. I absolutely love this sound, but then on top of that, there's a momentum in the full album experience that comes from most of the pieces clocking in under two minutes, individual moments can show some patience with their sounds but overall there is a constant forward movement that makes this a fantastic experience. Do not miss this one!"

  • PP-07: Cheap Heat, Technical Reserve - Foxy Digitalis
  • ◦ "Ever wonder what it might be like to be a tiny insect that gets lost inside a machine? What do singing circuit boards sound like when encased in glass tubes? Technical Reserve goes absolutely microscopic on PP-07, scratching out ideas in chalk and blowing them into nothingness with skittering methodologies and bizarre musical escapes."

  • PP-07: Cheap Heat, Technical Reserve - Peter Margasak
  • ◦ "The trio’s new album PP-07 was just released today. I haven’t had a real chance to dig in, but on first blush it’s another gem. Call me old-fashioned, but the collisions and connections between Borden’s hyper-tactile cello sounds and the harsh electronics elevates the synthetic element. It could be that I just can’t locate the more rigorous machinations within the electronics, so I find the cello-electronics divide more transparent, but either way they all prove to be exceptional listeners with stop-on-a-dime reflexes."

  • PP-07: Cheap Heat, Technical Reserve - Boring Like A Drill
  • ◦ "There’s a lot here: 19 tracks seventy-something minutes but it stays fresh because nobody ever seems to really know what they’re doing. This is harder than it sounds in free improv, supposedly reliant on technique yet really in need of desperation as the spur to invention. Technical Reserve takes us back to a simpler time when the gear doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, albeit now captured with pornographic clarity. It’s rude and it’s noisy but, to pursue the wrestling analogies that crop up in the sleeve notes, for this audience that’s a cheap pop."

  • Overtime Liquor, Other Plastics - Noise Not Music
  • ◦ "Brown and Cole refract spontaneous actions through an arsenal of repurposed electronics, which may include anything from laptops and complex synthesizer routings to messes of frayed cords and broken-open devices. Opener “Dommy Speaks,” in a short and raucous flurry, displays the distinct palette of artificial emission and erroneous electrical chaos with which they will be working over the eight successive tracks; the austere blasts of caustic digital noise and budget sine tones are certainly in a similar vein as the work of other more “academic” electroacoustic improvisers, but there’s always a unique freedom to Overtime Liquor, a barely audible but persistent whisper of anything goes beneath the plastic folds."

  • Overtime Liquor, Other Plastics - The Squid's Ear
  • ◦ ""Electronics" duo Dominic Coles and Hunter Brown's work together is fluid, sometimes bratty in its gnashing and unpredictability of when to lean in to observe some sophisticated micro chatter or back away to protect your ears from jarring mixer feedback. At barely over a half hour, the album is a suite of brief freak-outs and a couple long-playing, ever-evolving environments that, while sonically on another planet, invoke the whimsy, oddity, experimentation, and complexity of Anton Webern's compact oeuvre."