Cover art for On the DLL, released December 19, 2012
In 1995, I downloaded a program called Impulse Tracker. Originally I got it because I wanted to make music using sounds I'd recorded myself, but I ended up discovering a new way to appropriate -- it let me open any file on my computer as if it were an audio file. The sounds were exciting, composed by a machine in arrangements that human ears weren't meant to hear. I became a sample digger, but instead of digging through crates, I plundered my own hard drive, collecting my favorite DLLs and searching for the best-sounding file formats, reworking the tones into tunes and the bytes into beats.
Of course, if you can turn a spreadsheet into a song then you can also turn it into a picture or a movie, and vice versa. Suddenly my music practice had corrupted me from a musician into an artist -- if sound file and image are the same, then so are music and art. But every few years I hear the data sound calling me to revisit it, to seek out new sounds and new data types, remix it with new tools.