[The User] is a Canadian based artists collective made up of two men who manipulate the sounds of Dot Matrix Printers to make their interesting brand of minimal electronic music. Music made from the droning sounds of outdated printers with all of the familiar buzzing, thumping and humming that you would never think of as harmonious. Yet here it is, tediously uniform yet strangely rhythmic.


And an explanation straight from the horse's mouth:

"The Symphony For Dot Matrix Printers is a work which transforms obsolete office technology into an instrument for musical performance. The Symphony focuses the listener's attention on a nearly forgotten technology: the dot-matrix printer. Specifically, it employs the noises the printers make as the sole sound source for a musical composition. Leaving the constituent elements untouched, the process imposes a new order upon them, reorganizing the sounds along a musical structure.

Dot matrix printers are thus turned into musical 'instruments', while a computer network system, typical of a contemporary office, is employed as the 'orchestra' used to play them. The orchestra is 'conducted' by a network server which reads from a composed 'score'. Each of the printers plays from a different 'part' comprised of rhythms and pitches made up of letters of the alphabet, punctuation marks and other characters. [The User] uses ASCII textfiles to compose, orchestrate, and synchronize sonorous and densely textured, rhythmically-driven music. During the half hour performance, the sounds are amplified and broadcast over a sound system. The audience is also presented with live images of the sound sources: the motions of the mechanisms, rollers and gears are captured using miniature video cameras installed inside the printers and projected onto large screens."

I've uploaded the second part of the project, simply titled Symphony #2 For Dot Matrix Printer. This one was more of a full length album, clocking in at 41:22 rather than the #1 which didn't even reach 20 minutes.

Download: [The User]-Symphony #2 For Dot Matrix Printers


And if you'd like to hear #1 it's been uploaded at Misterioso Impossivel.