Mental Static by Chelidon Frame

The year is 1997 and my 7-year-old self is watching a phosphor green caret blinking on a deep black background. I can't write a line of code, but the aesthetic is charming, with its strictness, its coldness, and its simple yet functional design. A floppy disk is the only way to store data, and you have to be careful, selective in what you want to preserve.

The year is 2014 and Chelidon Frame is born, an electroacoustic project where I can turn myself loose and experiment with sounds, structures, and unconventional approaches. Since the beginning of this voyage, I always wanted to do a coding/programming-related series of songs, to recapture both the aesthetic and the limitations of those initial days.

The year is 2021 and after hearing what overly compression and bit rate reduction can do to a sound I came up with an idea: do a full digital 10-minutes track - limiting myself only in using software instruments, without actual recordings - and shrink it down to the overall quality of 8kbps, to let it fit inside a floppy disk or through a 56k modem connection. The result is a new piece, where the imperfections and the difference between today and twenty years ago emerge in the foreground, resulting in a completely new and different aural perspective.

The main theme in this 10-minute soundscape named "Mind Static" is coding, coding errors, and less common (and therefore evocative) subjects, from esoteric hexadecimal code DEAD10CC to frequent bad approaches like "Cargo cult programming".

Music for commercials is a label dedicated to environmental preservation. All profits are donated to associations for the protection of the environment and anti-advertising actions.

The label promotes diverse and open aesthetics, from noise, to IDM and pop.

Our releases take place on second hand floppy disks. We prefer to use obsolete material to make useful and usable work of art.