Glitch Audio as Artefact, Error, and Aesthetic
By Lloyd Lewis
In the early 1960s, amidst Cold War anxiety and analog perfectionism, composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis began weaponising error. Tape hiss, feedback, mechanical stutter — these weren't faults to be scrubbed clean, but artefacts to be studied, manipulated, looped. By the late 20th century, this conceptual shift had metastasised into a full-blown aesthetic: glitch. Where others heard failure, pioneers of the genre heard signal. They understood that every break in fidelity was not just a malfunction, but a message.
Glitch music is often misunderstood as noise for noise’s sake — a caricature of cracked CDs, broken DSP chains, or laptop seizures. But in truth, glitch is the sound of systems in distress, speaking in tongues. It is the sonic equivalent of a memory leak, an overheated server rack, a collapsing architecture rendered beautiful in its final flickers. In a world defined by smooth UX and seamless streaming, glitch insists on drawing our attention to the seams—the faultlines beneath the interface.
Tracing the lineage of glitch is an exercise in recursion. It loops back on itself, as if folding time through its own corrupted samples. Consider Alvin Lucier’s 1969 piece I Am Sitting in a Room, in which his voice is played into a space repeatedly until the resonant frequencies of the room itself erase language. That recursive degradation is pure proto-glitch. Jump ahead to Oval’s 94diskont (1995), where Markus Popp fed CDs deliberately marked with felt-tip pens into players to extract percussive pops and mechanical jolts. Or Autechre, whose late ’90s and early ’00s output became a kind of procedural glitch fractal, governed as much by machine logic as human intention.
By the 2000s, artists like Ryoji Ikeda, Alva Noto, and Fennesz were forging entire sound-worlds from digital detritus. Labels such as Raster-Noton and Mille Plateaux emerged not just as record labels but as curatorial institutions of glitch. Even pop-adjacent acts like Björk and Radiohead began drawing from the palette — glitch had gone from fringe to framework.
And yet, something of its original spirit remains elusive. Glitch, at its core, is anti-genre. It’s not a preset or plugin; it's an ideology of rupture. It demands an engagement with uncertainty. Its beats do not resolve. Its harmonics do not soothe. It is deeply honest music: the sound of failing systems, revealed in exquisite detail.
This track, What Fuckery Is This?, began not as a composition but as a confrontation. A corrupted field recording in my favourite studio (any Coffee shop in Europe), a failed bounce, and a DAW that refused to save properly — all feeding into an early-morning session of spectral slicing and stochastic sequencing on an iPad. The result is a piece that resists resolution, modulates tension, and balances between rhythm and revolt. There’s no snare you can trust here, no kick that anchors the pulse. Instead, jittery motifs smear across a fractured timeline, bound together by sheer defiance.
Glitch isn’t retro. It isn’t futurist either. It’s something like post-temporal. It treats time the way cubism treated perspective: as a thing to be exploded and reassembled on its own impossible terms. This is why it sits so well within the broader narrative architecture of The Hollow Circuit, the upcoming multimedia universe authored by Awen Null. Just as glitch corrodes fidelity, The Hollow Circuit corrodes narrative certainty. Each fragment of its story is a corrupted packet, a looping echo from a future that may never arrive.
My ongoing audio work will bleed directly into this expanded world — not as soundtrack, but as artefact. Audio zines will emerge, self-contained glitch capsules carrying sonic essays, coded rhythms, and subversive metadata. Some will be embedded with voice fragments and corrupted poetry; others will house broken emulations of forgotten instruments. These aren’t releases in the traditional sense. They’re transmissions — deliberate anomalies in the cultural signal.
Art of FACELESS, the label-archive-mythology that frames this work, will serve as a conduit and amplifier. It’s not a brand, it’s a breach. Expect upcoming MSUX pieces to flirt with obsolete codecs, tape-spliced drones, unstable phase fields, and binaural field distortions gathered from underpasses, graveyards, and broken infrastructure. Some will arrive as Bandcamp exclusives; others only as QR-tagged street drops or burned CD-Rs lost in library books.
This isn't nostalgia. It's necromancy.
In a world defined by slick recombinance and algorithmic mimicry, glitch remains our last honest dialect. Its distortions aren’t accidents. They are chosen deviations—acts of aesthetic rebellion. Every clipped transient, every packet drop, every unrendered frequency is a reminder that perfection is propaganda. The fuckery is not an error. It is the code becoming self-aware.
And so we lean into it.
We wiretap the void.
We fuck with the signal.
We listen for ghosts.
![LloydMSUX[DELETED_order/6577655]](/content/images/size/w600/2025/12/a2009094517_10.jpg)
