At its most basic, a CODEC is a piece of code that allows the compression and decompression of data for the purpose of storage and transmission. It literally stands for EnCoderDecoder. For us, CODEC 13 refers metaphorically to the translation or movement, though electronic formulation, from one form of understanding and appreciation of our human experience to an electronic and now digital musical regime of self-expression.
Codec 13 is an electronic music project by Jim MacDonald and Pierre Ouellet inspired by the presence and effect of all manner of technology in everyday life.
It is both meditation and action, thought and emotion at the intersection of the wired world we have created. It is at once an homage to the traditions of the electronic musical genre itself and an exploration of new aural discourses expressed though synthetized means.
Jim MacDonald and Pierre Ouellet were early adopters of electronic music and worked with the earliest synthesizers and first generation of sequencing software. Seminal influences include Wendy Carlos, Jean-Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, amongst others
Over the years, Jim and Pierre have continued to compose electronic music for film and television, often adopting some of the prevailing tropes and styles of the day as these found their ways into the mainstream vernacular of popular electronic music.
The CODEC 13 project is the ever-changing hybrid expression of the aural soundscape of everyday life, articulated to an ongoing reflection on the very nature of man-made sounds and their constraining or liberating potential in the expressive order of collective life.
The Recordings
Reign of the Machine examines the human surrender to digitalia after mechanization, the moment when automated tasks and practices finally asserted their dominance over the habits and routines of everyday life, when bar codes, RF ID, GPS and automated AI voice systems became transactional models for human practices, exchange and communication.
The Utilization Threshold riffs on the two concepts in its title, namely the ideas, processes and concepts of utility, use-value and utilization as these have come to refer to human individual and social practices.
Production Credits
Recorded, mixed and mastered at Venture Studio Toronto (2019)
All Codec 13 compositions by Pierre Ouellet & Jim MacDonald
Published by Venture Publishing (2019)
Album Art and Design by Catherine Piro.
Images from Computers – An Illustrated History
Christian Wurster – Taschen – 2012.
