Glitch

Glitch builds tracks out of the artefacts of digital audio failure: CD read errors, sample-rate conversion noise, MP3 compression artefacts, software crashes, and clipped buffers. Drums are often constructed from single-sample clicks; melodic content comes from broken sine waves and corrupted samples; entire tracks may run without any conventional instrument. The aesthetic argument is that the textures of failed digital reproduction are as legitimate a sonic resource as orchestral timbres. Volume range can be extreme: Ryoji Ikeda's 'dataplex' alternates near-silence with full-scale pulses that exhaust normal hi-fi systems.

Glitch took shape in the second half of the 1990s, with the German label Mille Plateaux's 'Clicks & Cuts' compilations (2000 onward) functioning as the field's central documentation. Markus Popp's project Oval used skipping CDs as the source for albums like '94 Diskont' (1995); Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto), Frank Bretschneider, and Olaf Bender founded raster-noton in 1996 in Chemnitz; Ryoji Ikeda built parallel work from Tokyo. The 'laptop music' performance practice — a single composer with a screen as the only visible instrument — became inseparable from glitch in the same period.

Pick a track and try to count the duration of an individual click: many glitch events are 5-50 milliseconds long, near or below the threshold of pitch perception, which is what makes them sound percussive rather than tonal. Notice where the silence is — many pieces are 30% empty space, and the silences carry as much weight as the events.

Oval, '94 Diskont' (1995) or 'Do While' (1995). Fennesz, 'Endless Summer' (2001) for the warm, melodic side. Ryoji Ikeda, 'Dataplex' (2005) for the precise/minimalist extreme.

Oval's Markus Popp made many of the 'glitch' sounds on '94 Diskont' by deliberately scratching, taping, and damaging CDs and recording the resulting playback errors — a process that effectively turned the CD player into a malfunctioning sampler.