Traitmediaworks – tmw32+ cdr1, tme32 CDR3/4 860.43MB FLAC
Localized Noise-Induced Transitions arrives as a numbered and signed CD edition of 200 copies, accompanied by an image of the equipment used to produce it. That photograph is important because Eric Lunde’s Short Range Acoustical Device does not resemble a neutral documentary tool. It suggests a portable apparatus built to interfere with the place it records. The release is based on field recordings made around St. Croix Falls and Rhinelander, Wisconsin, but Lunde does not simply collect the sounds already present at those locations. He introduces signals, captures environmental responses, degenerates the resulting material and passes it through what he calls reduplication processing. The field becomes an active system rather than scenery waiting to be preserved.
The eleven pieces retain their geographical labels, including several recordings identified with St. Croix Falls and its coordinates, 45°24′43″N 92°38′20″W. Coordinates ordinarily promise exactitude. They claim that a sound can be anchored to one measurable point on the earth. Lunde undermines that promise immediately. Knowing where a recording was made does not explain what is producing its hiss, vibration, clatter or intermittent feedback. The location is precise while the event remains uncertain. Longitude and latitude identify the listening position but cannot restore the chain of causes that created what passed through the microphone.
That tension separates Localized Noise-Induced Transitions from conventional nature recording. Birds, voices and wind can occasionally be heard, but they do not occupy a clean foreground. They exist inside a larger electrical and mechanical atmosphere. A stretch of environmental quiet may be interrupted by a narrow, burning frequency. A distant human sound emerges only after a mass of static withdraws. Clicks and knocks suggest objects being handled, machines switching states or the recording apparatus reacting to its own output. The recognizably natural and recognizably technological do not alternate politely. They contaminate one another.
Lunde describes the material as field recordings made with the Short Range Acoustical Device, a portable degenerator, reduplication processing and found or stolen recordings. “Stolen” changes the ethical and conceptual position of the record. A found sound may be treated as an accident or gift, but a stolen recording acknowledges an act of appropriation. The microphone removes an event from its original situation and converts it into portable material. Lunde does not pretend that recording is passive. He emphasizes the intrusion, then compounds it through copying, processing and displacement.
The Short Range Acoustical Device also echoes the language of the LRAD, the Long Range Acoustic Device used for communication, crowd control and sonic intimidation. Lunde produced a separate release directly addressing that technology, but the smaller device named here brings the politics of projected sound into a more localized scale. Sound does not merely describe territory; it can occupy territory, disturb bodies and alter behavior. By transmitting and recording within a limited area, the apparatus turns each location into a temporary feedback network. The environment receives sound, changes it through distance and reflection, and sends it back to the microphone.
The resulting music is often remarkably static, although static does not mean motionless. Lunde builds fields that remain within a narrow range while undergoing constant internal fluctuation. Hiss thickens and thins. Feedback approaches a threshold without always crossing it. A stable mechanical drone reveals tiny irregularities once the ear stops waiting for a dramatic event. These are the transitions promised by the title: not necessarily large changes from silence to impact, but shifts in the perceived state of an apparently continuous noise.
In scientific language, a noise-induced transition occurs when random fluctuation helps push a system from one condition into another. Lunde treats that idea less as an illustration than as a working method. Noise is not the unwanted substance to be filtered out so that information can be recovered. It is the force that reorganizes the information. A field recording begins as evidence of a place, but the added noise pushes it toward abstraction. Feedback makes an outdoor environment resemble an electrical interior. Wind against the microphone becomes indistinguishable from processing. A human voice may initially seem documentary, then dissolve into grain, cadence and distance.
This is where Lunde’s history in American industrial music remains audible without turning the CD into a nostalgic imitation of his work with Boy Dirt Car. Since the early 1980s, his recordings have repeatedly treated sound as unstable material subjected to erasure, repetition and mechanical deterioration. Localized Noise-Induced Transitions applies that language to geographic space. Instead of building songs from metal, percussion and vocal aggression, it allows environmental recordings to carry the abrasion. The landscape itself becomes the damaged medium.
The Wisconsin settings complicate the familiar industrial atmosphere. St. Croix Falls sits beside a river, cliffs, trails and wooded land rather than the stereotypical factory district associated with industrial music. Rhinelander carries its own mixture of town, forest, road traffic and machinery. Lunde does not force those places into a single romantic image of the rural Midwest. A country performance, bird activity, wind, refrigeration-like hums, unidentified motors and electronically produced tones can all belong to the same regional sound field. Rural space is revealed as already technological, traversed by amplification, engines, ventilation, radio signals and human speech.
The tenth piece introduces the release’s clearest spoken material, including the sound of an academic lecture. Placed among environmental recordings and degraded signals, the voice no longer possesses automatic authority. Speech becomes another localized emission competing with air movement, room tone and mechanical vibration. The lecturer may explain something, but the recording process prevents explanation from mastering the surrounding noise. Language enters the field and is reduced to one event among others.
Because the album avoids spectacular volume for much of its duration, it rewards attention to thresholds. Noise listeners expecting continuous punishment may initially hear restraint, while field-recording listeners may find the electronic intrusions unusually hostile. Lunde holds the CD between those expectations. Feedback rises but frequently remains just short of eruption. Environmental detail appears but is never allowed to become picturesque. The pieces feel suspended between documentation and sabotage, each one preserving a place while simultaneously damaging the possibility of hearing it clearly.
Localized Noise-Induced Transitions ultimately presents recording as a physical encounter among device, operator, environment and listener. The CD does not offer Wisconsin as a set of recognizable sound postcards. It preserves the friction produced when a particular apparatus was activated at particular coordinates. The limited, signed object extends that specificity: one of 200 discs carries copies of sounds that were themselves copied, stolen, repeated and degraded. What remains is neither the original place nor a completely artificial composition. It is a transition state, fixed temporarily on a compact disc—the noise of a location changing under the pressure of being heard.
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