SOLO FOR CHAIR AND FEEDBACK CIRCUIT by JOE COLLEY

Recorded live at SFEMF, October 12 2006, SOMArts, San Francisco California

"I love it
Jérôme Noetinger (2020) "

"Colley is a wonderfully inventive California based composer whose work explores both friendly and unfriendly ends of the sonic spectrum. The music on “Solo For Chair And Feedback Circuit” is immediately compelling because of the splendid image the piece’s title evokes, and continues to engage with its cartoon-ready sound events, which conjure up endless scenarios involving witless coyotes.
Byron Coley, The Wire (2019)"

"I love a good art single. I understand they are a hard sell these days (what isn’t?), but I do think it is a shame that almost no one makes them anymore. Joe Colley has long been a proponent of the format, and he’s holding the line here, along with the always reliable Meeuw Muzak label out of Belgium. There is not much to go off based on the packaging (in fact the person lounging on the cover is not even an illustration of Colley, but a generic clip art graphic found by Meeuw boss Jos Moers), but we are told that “Solo for Chair and Feedback Circuit” was recorded at SFEMF on October 12, 2006. Although Joe’s work, both under his own name as well as the Crawl Unit moniker, always has a certain sense of instability and jocular dread to it, for the sake of discussion it can be divided into 3-4 subcategories based on compositional methods, this one fitting into the installation/performance activated sonic phenomena realm. As the title suggests, it seems that there is an amalgam of microphones or some type of extremely sensitive sensor device attached to a chair that responds to its movements. This results in not so much continuous or circular harsh feedback patterns but rather short bursts of different tonal frequencies that Joe (or whoever is sitting in the chair I guess) manipulates to his liking. A pretty simple idea as far as these things go, but it does have legs. It is similar in concept to a swinging bench that was also mic’d in a Tony Conrad retrospective I saw last year, though the way that was set up created much more sustained, monolithic sounds, whereas Joe’s piece is very spastic. “Solo for Chair and Feedback Circuit” also made me reach for Ross Manning’s self-released “LED” 10″ from a few years back, and while there I doubled down with the Asmus Tietchens “Leuchtidioten” on Die Stadt, so I am indebted to Joe for that. Another great Colley 7″ to add to the pile, what more can you ask for?
Thomas D’Angelo, Mutually Assured Marginality #6 (2020) "