tony herrington in the wire (here) :

frans de waard in Vital weekly (join):

MARTIENSGOHOME - ABSCONS DEPUIS 1996 (USB stick, private) Size wise the smallest release of this week, and also a first: the USB stick by Martiensgohome, the collective of sound makers from Brussels, whose prime interest it is to produce works for the radio. They play with other people, both musicians and dancers and visual artists, and have had various releases. They exist since April 1996 and to celebrate their 12 years of existence (I think 13 but who knows), they released this USB stick with no less than ten complete albums of unreleased material from their 600 hour archive. This makes this smallest item of the week, but by far the biggest. You'd have to excuse me but I didn't hear it all. There is some 13 hours of music around here. I played most of them, if only partly, and I must admit its all quite interesting. Martiensgohome use lots of computer processing, laptop techniques and field recordings and can, perhaps, best be compared to Farmers Manual. They share a love of all things laptop, be it ambient, or partly rhythmic, lesser here than with Farmers Manual, crackling and hissing. Its a pity that this USB stick doesn't have an earplug connection and one could play this on a long train journey. But of course its easily transferred to a MP3 player. Just like the Farmers Manual DVD which lasted three or so days, this is a likewise heavy bundle, but more light weight. Certainly as nice. (FdW)

jay bryant in aesthetic interlude (here) :

Martiensgohome is a Brussels based sound collective, founded in April 1996, that has published a nicely packaged retrospective ‘box set’ in USB-key format. The key and its box are made of bamboo, and contains the equivalent of ten complete ‘albums’, previously unissued, as well as some photographs. I haven’t heard any of the music yet, but the collective describes itself as “Operating at the crossroad between radio drama and improvised electronic music”. With such a fetish-object styled package does it really matter what the music is like?

john in the velocity blog (here) :

I ran across this today at Aesthetic Interlude, and thought that times certainly have changed. I remember boxed sets well, and used to open them with such excitement. Reading the liner notes, studying the artwork, and marveling at the unique packaging could take an entire afternoon. One thing has not changed, and that’s the unique packaging. Here’s a bamboo boxed set on USB-key of Martiensgohome. I too have never heard this Brussel’s based sound collective, but was amazed at what boxed sets have become. This little USB-key holds 10 albums and photographs. Amazing and eco-friendly.

ayeball (here) :

ten albums worth of relatively spartan Belgian electro-acoustic improv on a bamboo USB stick housed in a small wooden box - gorgeous design sense, something to treasure as an artefact. Am slowly beginning to work my way through its audio delights.

Creaig Dunton in brainwashed (here):

Consider this in the running for the "minimalist/maximalist" release of the year. While releasing an album on a USB flash drive is not a new thing, few of the ones thus far have had the same quality of presentation. Packaged in a small bamboo box, just slightly bigger than a matchbox, is an engraved bamboo drive which contains a total of ten unreleased albums, recorded between 1999 and 2008. Ten hours of music in a small box, which costs barely more than a single CD. However, with that much material, there is going to be a bit of overload.

I don’t think I’m the only Brainwashed contributor that is not a big fan of the digital-only direction music is taking. While I have an iPod and use it while driving/working, nothing is the same as putting a CD in the player, or throwing on a nice heavy piece of vinyl, and turning up the stereo system. In this case, at least the presentation is nice, and the sound quality isn’t bad for a series of 224k MP3s. Modern home entertainment technology has at least moved forward enough that I can plug this in and listen to it on hardware other than just on my computer. In this case also, I doubt this amount of material could have been released in a cost effective and artistic way.
Now, preface aside, on this one gig flash drive is a set of ten MP3s, one for each album and a small photo gallery, all organized by a simple, yet effective, html interface. For better or worse, the albums presented here could have all been recorded around the same time, as the style doesn’t differ greatly from piece to piece, but the approach and dynamics do.
Some of the albums stay restrained and soft: Cretion is a study in textures, with various clicks and buzzes staying extremely quiet, with the occasional processed thump of a microphone and a small amount of electronic interference. Of all of the albums here, this is the one that is more easily labeled as "laptop" sounding, being based mostly on a microsound type concept. The following Section is similar, though allowing in obscured conversations, the occasional melodic tonal section, and occasional outbursts of percussion and tiny guitar sounds.

There is also a notable set of "medium" sounding albums, the opening album Torsion uses ragged lo-fi guitar and minimal walls of electronic sound that are thick and syrupy, but not harsh or aggressive, occasionally pulling away to allow chiming melodies and pieces of feedback to come forth. Both Tance and Position have similar dynamics, the former uses ethnic environmental sounds and oddly warbling and phased tones while the latter has some crunchy, overdriven fuzz and lost radio transmissions that come to the forefront. Both also have a focus on beeps and bleeps that could be a conversation between robots, Position especially having a notable psychedelic, spacey bent to it.

Of course, a few of the albums also stray more into the raw and more harsh sounds too. Partition opens with what sounds like heralding horns that lead to a pass of quiet reflection, but the second half of the album drenches the ambient tones in heavy reverb, occasional percussive elements, and rawer, static sounds make it a bit more of a standout album. Topie’s opening of amp noise and heavy bass rumbles sets the stage for what will be the harshest album here: the rumbles swell to grinding and clipping levels that aren’t too far removed from what would be heard on the Cold Meat Industries label during the heyday of power electronics/death industrial, though the twittering, chirpy electronic sounds keep it from being too bleak or black. Even the blasting organ tones might keep this album away from the stereotypical "noise" imagery, though the approach isn’t all that different.

It is definitely tough to cover this, because there’s simply so much material to try and digest. Ten hours of abstract electronics, found sounds, and random improvisation is a lot to sit through at once. At times, the barriers between the albums become obscured and the sound all blends together. But, given the cost to content ratio here, picking an album to listen to here and there rather than going on an electro-acoustic bender is the best way to tackle this.

ed pinsent in soundprojector ( here)

From Brussels, this little bamboo box arrived. Inside the box is a USB stick, also covered with bamboo. On the stick are ten hour-long tracks, roughly the equivalent of 10 CDs of sound and music created by martiensgohome, an improvising electronica and sound-art collective. We know next to nothing about its membership, but they have collaborated with numerous well-known international performers, and creators from fields outside of music such as cinema, video, dance and visual art. There’s also a folio of nine photographs on the stick, which suggests our martiens compadres favour the laptop as their weapon of choice, although there may also be some malarkey going on with attaching contact mics and filters to anything that moves (or anything that doesn’t) to produce sonic effects. Their main dissemination method is radio, and if their claim is true they’ve been occupying a certain portion of Belgian airtime for a very long time with near-continuous broadcasts; they’d like to pitch themselves occupying some twilight turf midway between music and radio drama. I’m excited about the package, which seems a very elegant and distinctive solution to containing and distributing a large volume of musical material (and there’s more where this came from, apparently; they hold an archive of 600 hours of sound which covers the last ten years). A box like this is one credible alternative to uploading mp3s on the web, and still results in what the retailers call “tangible product”. I wish I could get more agitated about the actual music, which so far strikes me as rather uneventful and langourous, accomplishing little in its endless amiable sprawls. On the other hand, it’s certainly not unpleasant to listen to; and if we all had this as a continual soundtrack to our day instead of the aggressive racket that is force-fed to us in most urban centres, the chances are we’d be a lot friendlier to each other. martiensgohome say they want to evoke “a celebration of the sound spectrum, from the roughest noise to the tiniest resonance”, which is arguably an approach we can all agree with.