Out Now on Mille Plateaux
you can order on Bandcamp
“Man from Sol’s album Automorph Totality brings texture to the forefront and uses rhythm to create a weaving path through the abstract world of sound he has created. It explores the kafka-esque aspects of modern life and the emotional tension that comes from this dynamic. Abstract and abrasive sounds push you away while recognizable rhythms and harmony bring you closer. The album sits in a balance of rejecting and enticing the listener. Some of the Hyperglitch elements on display are: the embrace of atonal, “ugly” and unintentional sounds, and the contrast of those sounds with more emotionally dark atmospheres and harmony, and of course recursive/iterative sound design techniques. As the output of one sound design process is fed into the input of another, the output of that into the next, and so on until finally feeding the output of the whole chain back into the input, the layers of complexity and abstraction in the sound design grow exponentially. A key element in this process is controlling the flow of time by using “scrubbing”. This can be achieved while speed and pitch are linked, or unlinked as with phase vocoding where a sloshy spectral sound comes from the occasional misalignment of phase components or with granular synthesis which is more of a repeating/cd skipping sound that comes from the smalling looping sections called “grains” that define the style of synthesis. Man from Sol shows his expertise in all of these forms and gives us an album that leverages all of them in his unique style to create an emotional journey through his own imagined landscape.” (Woulg)
“Larger than the will of any individual, the totality of modern human society is simultaneously one constituted by our actions yet also a gestalt entity obeying an emergent logic of its own. Constellations of processes and events act in discordant symphony largely blind to each other, while together they constitute a distributed machine serving solely itself at the price of human abjection. Conceivable solely as an abstraction, but concrete to the very core of human objectivity, this totality is profoundly human in origin but absolutely alien to our needs. Its very shape is contingent upon the trajectory of history from which it emerged, a trajectory which is now dislodged and savagely dragged along as the totality cycles itself blindly forward in time, obeying nothing other than the immanent logic of capital. Ignorance of totality matters not to it, as those who possess knowledge of its contours are no less objects to its continual unfolding.
The horizon of its trajectory offers a fractal vision of futures such as ecological collapse, mass refugee crises, escalating pandemics, genocide, and more. Like the shards of a kaleidoscope, these morph in and out of each other, their causes and consequences all intertwined with the horrors of this perpetual unfolding of global capitalism. To grasp this all as a human is to accept it, for there is little else one can do.” (Man From Sol)