Usually, scarcity drives up the price of a good, and consumers switch to a less expensive product. But a certain breed-- the connoisseur-- prefers well-marbled Angus-bred beef to le Big Mac. Thus we have rare foods, rare jewels, rare grooves. There's an ironic twist in the world of electronic music, though, because the freshest work I hear lately uses everyday found sound as the basic element of composition. Musicians are hampered by financial constraints, and it's always cheaper to use your synthesizer's sound bank than to run around with a huge microphone hanging out of your pocket. Wake up, you bedroom composers! Out on the streets!

The Alien8 label made its name by supporting a variety of harsh, isolationist sound art, from Merzbow's experimental noize to Keiji Haino's avant-garde instrumentalism. France's Christian Renou (aka Brume) and Belgium's Slavek Kwi (the man behind Artificial Memory Trace) have seen individual albums on Alien8, but they had to wait five years for the label to release their 1996 collaboration. 1st Encounter resulted from long-distance cooperation, in which each artist constructed a series of electro-acoustic compositions from the basic samples provided by the other. Unfortunately, their animist ambitions were sometimes outdone by the scale of their project.

The samples used on the album are diverse and instilled with mysterious life. Headphone listening allows eavesdropping on sounds like cellophane drawn across Styrofoam, steam-driven pistons pumping, power transformers humming in the night, beetles' crackling carapaces, the endless furrowing of ant antennae, the piercing echoes of bat sonar made audible. Each moment is tangible; you can almost feel unknown substances slithering across your ears. Still, other sounds betray an amusing domesticity, as if one of the participants followed the other around the studio with recording equipment. Hear: the sound of duct tape unrolled! See: buzzing light switches flipped on and off! Trace: the shuffling footsteps of a sleepwalker!

But the poor sense of narrative exposition weakens the album. Take the first track as an example. A metallic squeal loops back on itself until the effect seems speech-like, while thudding percussion reverberates in the background, rising louder with each moment. The intensity reaches a peak, similar to Mark Spybey's work as Dead Voices on Air, and then a short static pulse spoils the climax. It sounds like television channels changing, and a good deal of the pieces here segue either through this switching device or with boring silence. Other times, an intriguing quasi-rhythm will disappear just when it became interesting, and another four minutes of unrelated sounds will close out the track.

If you're not going to use raw noise to create mechanistic rhythms a la the Ant Zen label, then successful noise should create an immersive soundworld-- one that develops through its own internal logic (whether industrial or ecological). But unlike Alien8's claim that this is an example of a long distance collaboration that "works," the transitions here are too bumpy and based on "Gotcha!" shock value; the effect is like listening to one of Disney's Sounds of the Haunted Mansion records. Repeated listens always bring familiarity, and there are brilliant moments of minimalist dub parsed throughout, but first impressions can be worthwhile: 1st Encounter plays like a sound sampler. In that sense, it will probably be used most often as a source record for those looking to imitate Herbert's Personal Contract for the Composition of Music. Still, there's an undeniable beauty to the sounds themselves, and connoisseurs of noise will enjoy hearing the tendency of these basic elements to divide and multiply.

-Christopher Dare