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Category and Disclaimer

Industrial. Electro acoustic. Found sound. Sonic art. Ambisonic UHJ surround sound. Psycho-acoustics. Who knows? It's monolithic, terrible, beautiful, annoying, static, hallucinogenic, like listening to a vacuum cleaner - - - - all these and more. Someone mentioned a couple of years ago, that hospital post-natal wards were using the sound of vacuum cleaners for their quiescent effect on newborns!!! All this whilst modern "Cymatics" researchers advocate the piping of 'calming tones' into classrooms with 'disruptive' children. Remember - "There is no Friend: There is no Enemy". There is only the process - and what you make of it. Kymatik was originally formed round a loose association of live and studio musicians under the name C.N.S. in north London in 1988. Members of The Worry Dolls, The Palookas, The Dead Tongues, The Triads, and many others used the squat where we were based and we engineered demos for bands that played at squatted venues in Stoke Newington and Hackney, and local pubs such as the Three Crowns. After what can only be described as a psychedelic epiphany in summer 1989, a couple of us started to experiment with multi-speaker recording and live sets of up to 6 hours in length! using microphones, acoustic instruments, found objects and effects units. This led to the release of several cassette only live sets including 'Recyclable' (with Dave Mulligan & Fabio D'Agostino), 'Aeon of Horus' (with Dave Mulligan), and the compilation 'Nephesch', which included members of some of the above bands, and other local musicians and artists, including the much remembered and very much missed Alex Robertson (R.I.P). In 1991 after meeting with Mark Tamea and Dan Reade, who were making more techno oriented music, Kymatik coalesced into something more structured and dedicated, with a common goal being a more rhythmic but no less psychedelic output. Nothing except 'Tisedni' has been released from those times, and it probably won't be. Most of us were leaving an area and a way of life that would probably never exist again - as the very dynamic and connected squatter/homeless movement began to disintegrate under extreme systematic pressure - and often authoritarian brutality. The next release did not appear until Clive Graham began Paradigm Discs. Kymatik collaborated with Morphogenesis in the archaic surroundings of the B.B.C. studios in a session where the Morphogenesis members were miked up live and then reprocessed live through a separate desk, producing two seperated end results - one a Kymatik mix, and the other a straight studio recording. 'Morphology' on Paradigm Discs Variations I is from those sessions. Most of the recordings are now on this site. Much of our time is spent searching for the perfect sound field to work on. We use Ambisonic microphones to record the source material and mixing/engineering is through CEPIAR and Audio & Design equipment in the Studio. Both of these systems were designed by the GENUIS Chris Richards and without him we would be in a sorry predicament. Without punching a key, Chris is the be all and end all of Kymatik's releases. more information on Ambisonics can be found by googling the word 'ambisonics'.

Recording Quality

Previewing our uploads to this site reveals a distinct drop in quality (especially for the field recordings), even from the mp3 versions made for uploading. If you would like to receive full quality mp3 files of any of these recordings, please contact us by email at nonserviam@lionslink.com or through the message box. You will need a mail cache large enough to accept the file/s or an ftp. Otherwise we might be able to torrent stuff for a maximum of 24 hours at isohunt or thepiratebay

Kymatik - Dar As Sulh volume I

Here are a few excerpts from reviews of the CD and/or its individual tracks. Several others appear on stalk.net/paradigm. . . . Tisedni' is the oldest piece in this set (1993) and the only one produced in collaboration (with Mark Tamea). A spin dryer served as the sole sound source to create the weirdest 11 minutes of progressive techno ever recorded. 'Lorenz Attractor' is the most difficult work to listen to. Kymatik can argue that it sums up ten years of research in psychoacoustics and that it is based on Lorenz's mathematical system, the fact remains that for 23 minutes all you will hear is a succession of cumulating tones starting below the range of the human ear and ending above it - linear, static, and of very limited appeal. Luckily, this track comes last. (François Couture). . . . . . It amounts to an intriguing document, but not an album I'd be inclined to put on and listen to. In that sense, it could be judged as a current parallel to such things as Luc Ferrari's 'Presque Rien' or Michael Prime's recent solo work. Interesting as art, or for those that yearn for something elite and uncompromising. Those that want a tune or some sort of musical reference - forget it! (Alan Freeman - Audion). . .. . . The sound experiments on this CD are filled with clarity which reminded me of a headache plagued CM von Hausswolff. The clear-cut minimalism is contrasted with raw and short field recordings which develop between the generator-buzz loops. An absolutely essential disc for friends of labels like Metamkine or Sonoris (Zipo). . . . . . Dentists For Mice' is probably the most immediately accessible, creating a dense loop & cut-up guided tour of the landscape after the bomb's dropped in Negativland. Later, a wonderful collaboration with Mark Tamea, 'Tisedni', processes the sound of a spin-drier into the kind of music you always thought 'techno' should sound like. Finally, the remarkable and punishingly affecting 23-minute 'Lorenz Attractor': a mind-reaming drone-tone which threads and dances its way through the inner ear in such a way as to create a vertiginous and disorienting audio-drug effect. When the sound abruptly ceases, the listener's head chimes with the neural harmonics of echoic memory. According to supporting material, the word 'kymatik' is derived from the Greek 'kyma', meaning 'a great wave', and was first coined by Swiss physicist Hans Jenny as a descriptive term for the effects he noted using amplified tones to manipulate and create patterns in fluids and powders. By applying a similar methodology, Kymatik attempts to do the same to your brain matter. . .File along with the likes of Battery Operated and Morphogenesis as UK sound artists of the highest echelon. (Tim Cornelius) ........ Dar As Sulh was originally set to be released under the title "The Caithness Two-Body Problem" as the first full length NonServiam CD. Only a few promo copies were produced before Paradigm Discs decided to release it. Button_Man, which was on the promo release, was replaced by Excerpt from Kandinsky's 'ImBlau' for the Paradigm CD, and the title was changed. Lorenz attractor was originally engineered in 4 mono tracks, but difficulties in mixing it down to UHJ stereo led to it being released with the rear channels omitted. The full 4 channel version - in either ambisonic B-format, or as 4 mono tracks - was released through NonServiam separately as a CD containing the relevant .WAV files, with an information sheet.

Kymatik - Dentists for Mice & Button_Man

(Review of Button_Man_For_The_City by Clive Graham). . . . . . This is the second CDR by the enigmatic Kymatik. Crucial to nearly all their music is the combination of shifting rhythms, field recordings and a strong psychoacoustic perspective. Although there are countless recordings by artists that utilise these elements, few if any do so with such originality. The success of this piece lies in the fact that none of the sounds are cliched and no sound overstays its welcome. It's hard to quantify exactly what it is, but the musicality and subtlety of this piece are clear from the start. The first 6 minutes of this 17 minute disc consist of haunting flute-like tones, a deep engine room bass tone and a whirlpool recording with heavy splashes. Unfortunately the mere description of these elements cannot give any impression of just how musical this section really is with its shifting organic layers. After the 6 minute mark the piece explodes into gentle text loops and fragmented loops combined with beautiful subaquatic tones that are both calming and spectral. The piece concludes with an accelerating heartbeat and some short text edits that could easily be taken from a news report. Again it's all highly musical (I can't think of a better word), and considered. All the recent Kymatik CD's make a special feature out of ambisonics, which takes the music out of the two speaker mode and into surroundsound, which requires a suitable decoder to appreciate this extra dimension to the music. For those of us who only listen to music in stereo there is still much to be gained from any Kymatik CD, and all are strongly recommended listening for anyone wishing to make music with a computer....... ..............Dentists was the first Kymatik release created solely on computer. It was released in 1997 in a metal cover with photo inserts by Madeleine Mosse. Limited to 48 copies, it sold out very quickly. It was rereleased on Dar As Sulh. Button_Man was released next, in a limited edition of 100 copies; each copy having an individually made cover. The original title was 'The Last Conversation', but it was changed because of our love for Robo Hunter from 2000 A.D. It has not been reissued. The original recording was in surround sound, which has been encoded into U.H.J. stereo, which can be played through a 5.1 system with some enhancement of the sound field. Several ambisonic decoders exist but they are hard to obtain. Decoding software exists for free on the internet, but usually requires a little patience and desire to implement.

Kymatik vs the Jahiliah - Music for Users

Music for Users has been 3 years in the making now. We have had some trouble encoding a mixture of ambisonic B-Format and mono audio files into a coherent mix of "Is Qliphoth the Real Twinkle" for release. Someone with access to the Dolby encoding systems offered to do it and we sent them the files: we never heard from them again! The track has been sent out through email requests to people with the time to set it up and listen to it using a multi-track digital audio workstation, such as Reaper - which is free to download from reaper.com .... Dawn on a South Devon Beach was recorded at Hope Cove near Bantham April 2007.

In Ov Bounds

This is a desk recording of our live DJ set from London 'Mindscapes', which housed about 5000 people with hard techno, trance, drum 'n' bass & abstract, and other rooms, with stalls and artists, and used to run once a month at The Drome, next to The London Dungeons. (Sort of like Megatripolis with bells on). We used to run a 4 channel Opus rig (utterly awesome sound) in ambisonic surround sound with an Audio Dimensions Soundscape Azimuth system front end in the chillout room, which held around 3-400 people. This system allowed us to remix live and replay the DJ sets and live musicians in surround sound, even if they were outputting in stereo only. Many well known DJ's and crew came to play. This is our own set from one of those events - and great fun they were too. Anyone go to any of them? This is quite a dark set, beginning with some rhythmic stuff used to mix it out of the previous DJ's set. This is not all our own material. Most of it is non rhythmic and it was intended for a crowd of hardcore Mindscapes regulars, many of then spending an entire night - or at least several hours - in the chillout - as with the other rooms. During this period we played live with all sorts of strange people, including a great live set with members of The Alabama 3 and Jason James, for the launch of a Channel 4 Sci-Fi season, which unfortunately we didn't record! Shame.....................If anyone would like a text version of the 'Robot Speech' on this recording, just mail us.

Kymatik vs the Midwitch Cuckoos - Runswick Baywatch & Shunt E.W.S.2455

(Review by Gabin Sora). . . . . . . There are many answers to the question "What is the difference between good and bad experimental/industrial music", but the most concise and accurate answer might just be "Listen to Runswick Baywatch by Kymatik". This CD firmly expresses those genre characteristics: the lack of coherent tonal structure as a constant and defining aspect, the concept that one might become lost in the randomness of it all, the lack of identifiable source material. All these are characteristics of these kind of works from processed field recordings to electronically engineered collages and compositions from Stockhausen, Luc Ferrari, Alvin Lucier etc, through The Hafler Trio and Merzbow, Leafcutter John and on, but beyond that there is a feature that often escapes the definition - that of listenability. For me the defining characteristic of such music is how often do I actually get up and put the thing on. If that was the only distinction needed between "good" and "bad" music then this CD would be in my top 10 for the year, but what does listenability mean? Let's just say that "conventional music" (of the type made by popular artists) has its listenability in the catchiness of its rhythms and tunes, essentially its repetitiveness. With experimental/industrial music that cannot often be the case, and so complex dynamic qualities and intriguing substructures take the place of rhythmical and tonal considerations. The two pieces on this CD fulfil all my requirements of listenability and then some. Runswick Baywatch consists of constantly changing soundscapes (some rhythmical and some atonal) of unfathomable origin, which act like some kind of travelogue of a dreamlike journey on which all the images are from your own memories. Some artists I could name would have made an entire album from 5 minutes of this track. Very effective and cinematic. ShuntEWS2455 is something altogether different: an installation recording in which all the sounds are effectively the same, but variously located in a large enough space so that when recorded (with a surround sound microphone nonetheless), micro differences in the tonal quality of each source becomes a constantly shifting atonal background. This is one of those very rare pieces of noise that one has to "listen through". Many have tried and most have failed to achieve this type of work and I only wish the track was longer. Taken together this short 30 minute CD hits the mark where so many others fail. It's distinctive, uncompromising, different, and beyond any of these extremely listenable.. . . . . . . . .Runswick Baywatch was created from a series of field recordings made in North Yorkshire, with the assistance of Tim Fletcher. Locations included Staithes, Runswick Bay, The Steiner Centre at Botton. Participants included Undertaker and Accordian player Harry Thompson, Local Artist Davey Mulholland and a New Year's Eve full of pub revellers. Try thinking of it as a modern day sea shanty, and a story of folk who dwell at the edge of the land - intoxicated. Shunt E.W.S.2455 is a recording of a live installation. 4 steel studding rods were mounted vertically in the environment and then ring washers were allowed to 'run down' the rods, creating a jangling effect. The resultant resonant combination was recorded by placing a Soundfield Microphone in the centre of the room.

Kymatik vs Boom Click - Homegrown meets Boxman

Those cheery chippers Boom Click let us play around with their track. A bit of TripHop inna Kymatik stylee - or vice-versa.

Kymatik - The Paignton Anomaly

The first time two original members of Kymatik have had the opportunity to work together in over a decade. The two pieces are from the same source recordings, made in Devon U.K. in late November 2007. One track is available here and the other, "Planked and Shored", is available from virb.com/marktamea They were finished within a couple of days of each other, and will be released in early February as a NonServiam joint venture, in a limited edition of 35 copies with glass artwork and information booklet. UNFORTUNATELY, EVEN AT HI-RES THIS MP3 VERSION IS NOWHERE LIKE THE CD. MP3 FILES JUST CAN'T HANDLE THE FREQUENCY LAYERING ON THE TRACK.

Kymatik - Lift Yourself into the Gasses

Due for release in March/April 2008. 3 track CD. 1. Early. (14:40) 2. Lift Yourself into the Gasses. (33:13) 3. Dean Evans sings The Blues. (12:00)

Kymatik - Atmospheres Magnetiques Volume I

Two excerpts: one from an early morning, and one from an evening recording in the Ardèche, France, and one third made inhigh summer up in the Sierra Nevada, Southern Spain (Around 1600m). These are stereo versions of full surround sound (with height) field recordings. Future projects in this series will be released on DVD enabling the listener/s to remain in the same ambient space for several hours. They can be ordered from nonserviam@lionslink.com and will be available in Ambisonic B-Format (as 4 .wav files), or mixed down into UHJ stereo, which can be played back through 5.1 and other consumer surround sound systems to some good efffect. Plans for building decoders exist online for free, as do many software plug-ins for listening to ambisonic recordings. The intention of this series is to create complete environments that may last as long as 12 hours, allowing the listener to become completely immersed in the ambient field. Even in their simple stereo form they will be of use to Holistic and Alternative medical practitioners, those who use meditation, other transcendental techniques and occult disciplines. They also provide the perfect antidote in chill-out rooms in venues and clubs. The use of ambisonics means that with the right set-up a completely realistic ambience can be created, offering the most complete approximation of the real thing.

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Discography - see all 9

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  Kymatik - Atmosphères Magnétiques Volume I

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  Kymatik - The Paignton Anomaly

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  Kymatik - Lift Yourself into the Gasses

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  Kymatik vs. The Jahiliah - Music for Users

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  Boom/Click vs. Kymatik - Homegrown meets Boxman