Diet Audio

Detail: In Paris in the 1950s, a man named Pierre Schaeffer made what was termed at the time as musique concrete, which used both sounds from conventional instruments and recordings from Schaeffer's surroundings, like street sounds.

During the same time period, in Cologne, Germany, Karlheinz Stockhausen used sine wave generators (they make sounds similar to musical instruments and/or the human voice) to create music that sounded like the cold, otherworldly soundtrack of a sci-fi film. These two events are considered to be the birth of the genre known as Electronica.

Flash-forward about 50 years, and you have Diet Audio, who combine real instruments and computer generated loops and samples to make what those in Schaeffer's circle might have termed Musique de peau et de rêves -- "Music of Skin and Dreams."

Diet Audio's songs are like snippets of dreams strung together with the rough silk thread of Whitaker's voice. Images immediately leap to mind with their music, but they're not always distinct images, more often blurred and quick-cut, suffused with the strange light that only seems to exist in your subconscious. Their songs are constructed like a half-human/half-robot heroine of some anime-noir.