For the Automatisme – Alter- album. I am inspired by how the art historian Nicolas Bourriaud is defining the Altermodernism. Bourriaud understands the term “Alter” as a way to mean “other”. The altermodernism would be another modernity that is different from the avant-garde modernism and post-modernism. More precisely, this is a new paradigm from the XXIe century with alternative ways to motivate artists to be more radical in art by traveling in the physical and digital world, by cutting the frontiers and by creating other time lines. I am applying the “alter” subject to time and to landscape and those, to the rhythmic and the ambient glitch music.
1- THE ALBUM HAS A RHYTHMIC SIDE AND A LANDSCAPE SIDE.
1- a : The rhythmic tracks are named Alter-Rate. That means that i am offering other types of rhythms by calculating beats with time rate experimentations. The form of the rhytmic tracks, expresses a course, a wandering, which, in the altermodern life, is not just in a standard 4/4 , or just grid based or non-grid based, but it’s in a complex hybrid of all of those.
1- b : The ambient tracks are named Alter-Scape. That means that i am offering another type of landScapes by a freeze temporality and not a random time or the time of the nature. Alter-Scape tracks mimic the saturated globalized soundscapes of the XXIe century.
2- THE GLOBALISED AND SATURATED TIME
For Bourriaud, the artists are responding to a new globalised perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication1. The Alter- album is creating saturated rhythms Rates and saturated time froze ambient soundScapes. The specific context within which we live is the age of globalisation2. In this album, it means that globalised or always evolving rhythm Rates are in constant movement and are also different every time an Alter-Rate track is exported or performed. On the other hand, a globalised landScape is a fixed time effect ambient track. In the era of the altermodern, displacement has become a method of depiction3. The movement of the sound of the Alter- album are two things. The first is the rhythms that make time movement become apparent and the second is an ambient frozen time that makes possible to feel and to analyze the movement effect of our surroundings.
For Gilles Deleuze, art is in a constant state of tension, in as much as it oscillates between the poles of chaos and order4. The Alter- album is a tension between chaos and order in rhythmic beat tracks and ambient soundscapes tracks. It is a deterritorialization of the rhythms and the ambiences of today’s natural and digital landscapes and it brings them into the computer glitch music format.
By pushing new softwares to their limits, i am pushing at the extreme the software capacity to calculate and to generate sounds. The Alter-Rate tracks are experimenting time rates and rhythms with using probability and artificial intelligence based sequencers. The partition signal is starting from a master sequencer that gets into every instrument on a track. Each instrument is receiving this signal and modulating it with other sequencers that are each programed differently in each instrument. Finally, all the instrument signals are returning to a master output that is using a stutter effect that, at its turn, is sequencing the whole channels into one single rhythm. In short, a single rate is merging and expanding into a vast archipelago of rates and its transformation is returning into a new single rate. The Alter-Scape tracks are experimenting midi triggers that give the sensation of a timelessness. Multiple reverb effects are also routed into each other to create soundscapes of continuity. About the type of sounds created in this album, i am experimenting deep frequency modulation synthesis (FM) on every Alter-Rate and Alter-Scape tracks.
I put a few layers in the tracks to be able to focus on the time. They are generative track that every parameters are using probabilities. This is something that was not possible some years ago. The computers are enough powerful to generate that now. I am exporting many times the tracks and pushing the computers to their limits by making hard for them to calculate and generate the tracks by deep, pointillist and extreme programming. These techniques are doing slightly different versions, each time that i am exporting or performing a track and in my opinion, this is opening a fresh and innovative way to do new experimental club music and ambient music. The computer has its own limits too.
1 https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/altermodern/altermodern-explain-altermodern/altermodern-explained
2Ibid.
3 https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tate-triennial-2009-altermodern-borders
4https://non.copyriot.com/deleuze-guattari-and-the-schizo-attractor-ultrablack-of-music/
Live Concert in Frankfurt, Sa. 23.11. at 0no2
check here
Album out in January 2020 on Mille Plateaux