Xerophonics is a sound art/copy art project based on recombining the digitally sampled sounds of copying machines. Xerophonics documents the rhythms and noises of xerographic machines and transposes the visual logic of copy art into an auditory register. Tracks combine the sounds of individual copying machines and filter these through the aural analogs of such techniques as copy motion, resizing, degeneration, and mirroring. While the sounds here are produced using brand name sources, the compositions swerve around the legal issues that often bedevil sampling proprietary sounds. These are noises no one thought to own, sounds considered incidental, except perhaps by the technicians who repair copying machines.

But if Xerophonics attends to the cadences of machines in sickness and health, it also documents a dream of how xerography might sound. Tracks are based on programming copying machines for tasks that generate interesting sonic patterns, but each composition is also, importantly, digitally realized, using an Ensoniq EPS 16 +, an early sampler workstation. Noises of image-copying machines are here processed through a sound-copying machine. Keeping one ear on the materiality of sound and the other on the world of Platonic sonic forms, Xerophonics respectfully rejects one of the ambitions of Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography: "to avoid attachment to worldly things and also to heavenly things." With Xerophonics there is no neat mapping of sound onto sight. Picture yourself in the dark, hallucinating a phalanx of fevered photocopying machines, a herd of nightmare clones.