Super Earbrickers Unite

Super Earbrickers Unite (usually stylised as SUP3R 34RBR1CK3RS UN1T3!) is an online community of musicians who create music together. Common themes or trends in their music include sampling other songs (including each other's) and splicing disconnected statements together to create garbled, semi-coherent lyrics. It isn't uncommon to find completely distorted files that require certain steps to listen to properly, such as cancelling a specific set of frequencies or reversing it.

A lot of regular listeners can't see the joy in following a scavenger hunt to get every piece of the song to overlay on top of each other, but fans enjoy the thrill of it and find that the extra physicality to 'earning your music' makes it become a meaningful experience.

The name for the collective comes from one stern Nepleslian critic's phrase when evaluating the sound for the first time without reading the instructions: “It's as though I'm having a brick pushed through my ear lengthwise. Horrible.” Further songs did not turn the critic's opinion around, but the phrase stuck and the collective adopted it. Their logo consists of a grinning, bug-eyed, square-shaped robot wearing a pair of bricks for earphones.

Every culture has its music. The Freespacers were no exception. After first contact was established with the Freespacers by Nepleslians, the native 'Spacers took an interest in the Electronic Nepleslian music palette and started putting their tunes out there. However, it was unlistenable to the human ear but it became popular with cyborgs or sound engineering enthusiasts who were able to look at the soundwave data or modify the song on the fly. However, to many listeners the sound just didn't compute.

Once the archives of the Earbrickers became more widespread and mirrored through the Nepleslias, the audience got wider - even after the fall of Great Lighthouse it was still receiving uploads daily on mirrored Nepleslian servers and keeping the Freespacer refugees who maintained the service funded by donating the proceeds from their tours to them. Some criticism from Freespacer purists to the sound argued that the Nepleslian contributions were too 'Straight', and it gave the Nepleslian movement of Earbrickers a subgenre to cling to - songs that didn't need instructions but still clung to the eeriness and madcap sampling of their contemporaries.

The Freespacer side of the collective insists that there shouldn't be a political slant to the contributions - stating that it's just not their battle to fight and they should instead focus on bringing the noise, literally.

• Cyclone Ride (2:53) - This song is split into three parts, each containing a different set of instruments and the lyrics. Listened to individually, each piece is missing words, bars of music or harmony. When interleaved upon each other, it becomes a coherent and rather catchy synth-pop song.
• Scraping Nails (1:45) - Without modification, this sounds like nails being scraped against a blackboard for a minute and three quarters. The instructions enclosed ask the user to isolate a frequency on the song's left channel and another on the right and amplify them. A soothing lullaby can be heard.

Super Earbrickers Unite has no set band members. Instead, it is a collective of different authors and artists from across the Freespacer Polysentience who contribute to a single, larger database spread throughout Nepleslian space. In addition, they allow non-Freespacers to contribute to the archive if they've got some good enough tunes that suit their tastes.

• echelon - Regularly adds songs to the database monthly. She tends to go for a harsher slant, with songs that screw with the shape of the sound when viewed in a spectrograph - often pictures or the instructions. Her fans routinely 'decode' her music for secret messages too.
• Jackie Kelly - A Nepleslian sound engineer right outta Funky City's lower-east side. A one person brass-band with access to a trumpet, trombone, tuba and horn - they often record each track individually and splice it together with urban noises to create what they describe as 'concrete jungle funk beat'.
• ViNULL - One of the handful of contributors to the Earbrickers that makes videos to accompany their beats, they take vinyl disks and stack them on top of each other in strange, oscillating towers to create warped, multi-layered and frankly horrifying noise that's mixed on the fly. It's unknown whether they're improvising with their equipment or if they've got rhythm or rhyme. They also release a lot of their songs 'Straight', which means there are no intended instructions for listening to it or changing it.

The collective doesn't have tours, but it does have archive compilations that consist of about one hundred of the best songs around a certain theme and sold to the public as mega-albums.

In addition, storage devices can sometimes be found randomly in locations as 'mix tapes', left behind to be discovered. Artist and distributor details can be found on the CD occasionally, assuming .

• YE30 - RTFM! - Read the Freakin' Manual! was intended to be a primer to the unique sound of the Earbrickers, with each song having its instructions spelt out for it to listen to the music.
• YE32 - Ghosts in the Audio - The theme for this compilation was unintended songs that were discovered when different decode instructions were followed, usually discovered by accident by curious listeners. So one audio file could potentially have two or three songs in it if you search hard enough.
• YE34 - SsOoUrNtD - Also known as “Sort Sound” or “Sound Sort” In this compilation, audio was created by using sorting algorithms generating tones as it accessed volumes of data by a metric. Songs could range from a few seconds to up to a minute depending on the size and speed of the sorting. Subgenres, named by how the data is to be distributed include Straight Line, Bézier, Bellcurve, Staircases, Roof, and Shuffle. There is also a subset called called Dual Condition, where two sorting algorithms are interlaced to create a dual-tonal song.
• YE36 - B4D455 - The theme of this compilation was Colour, with the album's name expressed in hexadecimal code creating a shade of green. Similar to using Slow-Scan Television signals to create images, songs hide tones at volumes that can create pictures when compiled a certain way. Alternatively, measuring the volume in tones to generate individual pixels of a larger picture. Songs were noted to be quite long for large pictures…
• YE37 - CUT/N/DRY - The -THEME!! of ~this~ com-mom-mooommmpilation is heavy sampling and distortion of voices taken from news broadcasts and advertisements from across the galaxy, potentially making entire songs out of a single sound of of a person's mouth, and managing to smear it across the entire song, potentially distorting that one clip to become every instrument. This got an large amount of entries from non-Freespacers who were not musicians. Instead, they were video editors who enjoyed distorting video clips and their sounds with them.

• Dubstep/Brostep - Skrillex
• EDM - Hybrid, Daft Punk
• Glitch and Chiptune - Disasterpiece
• Noise Metal - Lightning Bolt, Mindflayer, The Flaming Lips
• Synthpop - Com Truise, Lazerhawk
• Vinyl Terror and Horror

This page was originally created on 2014/05/03 06:28 by Luca.