FFR-002

For quite some time now, I have been operating under the assumption that I must not look back to what I have already perfected, and that the material I want to show the “world” should be completely new. The issue with this method of operation is that my documentation suffers from some significant gaps occasionally. To combat this, and also to sort of respond to the work of my peers, I have compiled some material, some of which has been previously self-published under a cc license.

My intentions for this record are not only to document the technical achievements I have undergone in the past year, but also to arrange this material in a way that is faithful to the larger concepts to which those achievements represent a response. Specifically, this album responds to the idea of an ‘album’ as a set of discrete but somehow interrelated set of information packets, each one encoded in some way which facilitates the mechanical reproduction of the whole.

In this context, the question of whether this is a “lossy” process, (like an MP3 or OGG), or “lossless” process (WAV, AIFF, FLAC), is somewhat arbitrary, as all encoding systems are truly self-referential, and the real substance of the experience comes from a sort of ‘quantization’ of one system to another. These artifacts of translation become the ‘content’ within the frame of the ID3 tags and JPG cover art. In this album, I have focused on the artifacts of spectral encoding, amplifying and building structures from the blemishes and internal nuances of sounds. The alchemical ‘insides’ of sound, which many simpler, non analytic granular processes totally ignore, can emerge and be manipulated in a number of surprising but phenomenologically convergent ways. Why commercially available sound-producing platforms all but totally neglect this area of open research is absolutely beyond me. I think it goes hand-in-hand with the faddishness of granulation in music right now. Much like the vocoder or the gate reverb in the past, the narrow mode of usage deemed commercially viable for granulation will certainly cause future consumers to reject the technique altogether, declaring the effect ‘retro.’ Listen to “Graceland” recently? Then you know what I mean (gags).