Circular Firing Squad: Oxide

Eva Baumgartner
Xopher Davidson
David Kwan
Tim Walters

Recorded live to DAT on October 19,1995.
Photos by Xopher Davidson and Tim Walters.
Design by Michael Sumner.

Four improvising composers embedded in an acoustic/electronic audio ecosystem. Each simultaneously consumes and is consumed by the others via a real-time sampling and processing network in which each individual’s output is available to all others as input. The landscape is littered with discarded objects, outmoded machinery, and the looted carcasses of prior inhabitants. Their sole album Oxide was recorded live to DAT on October 19, 1995.

“The sounds are astonishing and the combinations are original and innovative.” —“Blue” Gene Tyranny, AllMusic.com

… The striking thing about Circular Firing Squad, to me, is that although the individual elements of these pieces sound like the death rattles of elemental spirits of the industrial age, the collections of them sound, as industrial-noise compositions usually do not, like the result of human performance. If kids grew up reading art manifestos instead of Creem, and holding elemental spirits of the industrial age in a death grip were as easy as bar chords, maybe this is what garage bands would sound like. —glenn mcdonald, The War Against Silence