Digital Wanderer

    So, having downloaded the new Mogwai album, I put it on in the background, and got down to my studies, or something of the sort. It tinged and twanged in my crappy  dorm speakers nice and glamorously. The little guitars on the album are squeaky clean and ringing, produced to  hell and back, no wonder the album is being hailed as genius left and right. If you look at it as a factory-made cake, in which sugar, cream and other components are measured out to a tee, you have to admit the epithet is fair.
   But the sweet-sounding idyll was suddenly interrupted by strange jerks and stutters. Usually this means the file is broken, and I'd have to re-download the whole album. I was already about to wince, but the weird sound just wouldn't end. Then it hit me that one single file from the album couldn't possibly be totally broken, especially since I downloaded a RAR archive, which checks for integrity during unpacking using the CRC algorithm. In the end, I started to listen to the track further, trying to figure out if the Mogwai musicians really decided to mock the listener and shove onto a blatantly commercial and easily digestible record an evil and prickly track, resembling harsh cut-up electronica and partly the duo The Books. My opinion kept changing every few seconds, and my brain was paralyzed, because melodic instrumental music chopped up into small pieces by some creepy dismemberment maniac sounded simply mind-blowing.
   In the end, I decided that this was the artists' intention, and was already about to forgive Mogwai all their sins for such a stunt . But I had enough nerdiness in me to re-download the album anew just to check. Naturally, in the "normal" version of the album that same track Friend Of The Night turned out to be a rather boring single, which nowadays even gets airplay on FM radio, and is by no means a work of pathological anatomy art. And what I mistook for the musicians' persistence and maniacal nature turned out to be nothing more than a tricky recording defect. Obviously, the album was stolen from the studio while still unfinished, which is why the effect full of psychedelia and magic emerged. 
    Now I'll explain why the story has such a title. All of this pretty much reminded me of Andrey Gorokhov's constant talk about how sound quality doesn't have a decisive significance in perceiving music, and that the crisp and refined studio recording, which major labels and music craftsmen love so much, actually sometimes kills the magic and drive. My story is tied to such a point of view only indirectly, but it reminds us of similar things.
   About how technical means like sampling really did open up new horizons and allowed unprecedented ideas to be realized. And about how all techniques are truly permissible in sound painting: both noise and basically any sound can not only be built into a musical composition as decorative elements, but are music in and of themselves, or can form the skeleton of a composition. And about how chance can spawn things in art that sometimes cannot be achieved through long labor and virtuosity.
  For me these are absolutely obvious axioms, and it's very weird for me to see when people hold a different opinion. 

P.S. Not hoping that anyone will back my philosophizing, I'll still post the files.
Normal version   Amazing version