After landing (back) in New York City in 2018 following a series of catastrophic Visa breakdowns in Australia (which forced my family to relocate, quickly, to the other side of the planet for the second time in 5 years) I found myself going to the Brooklyn neighborhood dance clubs more & more often. The Generators & Redactions projects had started to wind down & after a series of great experiences at The Labyrinth and Unsound festivals, I reconnected with so much of the music from my youth & began to forge a pair of performance solutions that reflected my love of both algorithmic & systems-music alongside the timbral palette of “Golden Era” techno/electro.
The first element in this suite was a series of “Gridwork” engines created in Max-MSP that allow for real-time transient-analysis & on-the-fly rearrangement of virtually any signals in the audio domain. The year spent playing in a duo formation with Mark Fell had put all kinds of ideas in my head about how to decentralize & structure improvised rhythmic music going forward, and during a 2016 residency at Banff I had put in the ground-work, developing the wireframe of a contemporary engine to achieve this in a manner of weeks.
In a parallel development, in mid-2018 I began reconfiguring the same Eurorack Modular system used to record the “Generatorss” material, incorporating a series of basic timbral blocks, each beyond familiar: the zap-squelch of the envelope-filter circuit of the Roland TB-303 (modeled gorgeously in Euro by Eowave), a series of General MIDI PCM datasets (the Roland U-220 palette of my youth via via the Expert Sleepers General CV, along with decent simulacra of the Casio RZ-1 famously heard on Steve Poindexter’s “Computer Madness” & “Work That Mothafucka,” & the Linn Drum), the misunderstood “SuperSaw” wavesets from so many terrible 90s trance failures (recontextualized and patched for polyphony via the Acid Rain Technology Chainsaw), a series of vicious polyphonic “Virtual Analogue” & Wavetable engines (an homage to the Access Virus & Waldorf Micro/Wave topologies, realized mostly with the 4MS Spherical Wavetable Navigator, which👨🍳) & even a lightweight vocoder engine (ditto, Andrew’s disting). After a couple of test-runs in Australia, I christened all of this the Acid Causality suite after spending a great evening with Peter Rehberg [R.I.P.] & Russell Haswell in Basel in late September 2019; keeping in mind the multitude of connotations & contexts this phraseology holds.
At the awkward transition of hemispheres, I managed to squeeze in a handful of concerts of this music at the most bizarre of places (the famed Greenpoint Metal Bar St. Vitus hosted a particularly odd Monday night culmintaing in Nuclear Death Wish annihilating their borrowed instruments; a lively Market Hotel marathon organized around Bonnie Baxter & Hisham Bharoocha’s Kill Alters made much more sense, as did a Union Pool gig supporting old friend Luke “Helm” Younger; a going-away set opening for Rashad Becker in Northcote & another at the Tote with Primitive Calculators; even a festival appearance inside a dungeon at the top of the Dom Im Berg in Graz sandwiched between François “Kassel Jaeger” Bonnet & Ewa Justka, which was perfect) all of which proved to be fortuitous; the world had other plans come late February 2020 & the whole project ground to a halt without a trace, save for a few stray examples put up on Soundcloud & YouTube™. In a panic I began liquidating most of the Eurorack modular synthesizer hardware used in exchange for utility & grocery money as the pandemic kicked into high gear, long before the Stimulus/CARES schemes went into effect.
Around mid-March, Sanna Almajedi of e-flux got in touch about assembling a mix for their shuttered bar/restaurant/venue Bar Laika; one of my most frequented spaces, only a few blocks away from home. I leapt at the chance, and put together an hourlong blend (embedded to your right/below) of vocoded & “Resonated” home recordings in this vein from the prior year, which seemed to really get the music out there in a wonderful way. This triggered Calum Gunn of Conditional fame to write in about realizing a pair of cassette releases (a “Hi-Fi” selection of studio-recorded work & a “Lo-Fi” one of live takes recorded, largely with a tiny Sony PCM recorder & iPhone mics in-situ) which he then single-handedly collated, assessed, selected, edited, sequenced, and mastered over a 2-month period (everyone knows this is my Achilles’ heel, whittling down music into a sensible album-length program; Calum gets the collaborator-of-the-decade award, for sure). While our aims were true, in the end I only got as far as designing O-Cards to wrap around custom Black-on-Black Norelco boxes (the latter of which I gleefully custom-ordered from Jerry at AmTech in a quantity ranging in the lower quadruple digits, which then sat in their boxes for 3 years) before a series of personal setbacks & triumphs on both sides put the entire affair on ice.
In late 2022, as the last of a trilogy of LP “Reissues” (curated by Goat / YPY’s Hino Koshiro for his Nakid label, P&D’ed by Boomkat) of recent recordings I’d either posted on Bandcamp (R.I.P.) or manufactured as a “Private” Hi-Res AUDIO cassette, the majority of my performance in Eupen was issued as “Meakusma (Generators)” [NKD05]; I was reticent to use the AC designation given that I’d yet to frame it all, but honestly that’s splitting hairs; the long B-Side climax of Spherical Wavetable Navigator wrangling & the acid buildup towards it are certainly in & of this particular lane, if not exactly a stellar example (hey, I’ll own it).
I’ve resumed (September 2023) assembling the hardware systems following a period of relative inter-personal & life-structural calm, and with the goodwill gained in the summer-long second honeymoon of the Playthroughs ideas in hardware, I’ve started recording again in this more timeless-pulse-oriented vein. The beleaguered (H) & (L) titles have just gone live on all of the streaming apps & platforms in the great post-Bandcamp meltdown (YouTube™ playlists to your right/below) at almost exactly the 3-year anniversary of the finalization of the masters, with Calum’s blessing; have at it!
Performances:
Liquid Architecture (Northcote, May 2018)
The Tote (Collingwood, August 2018)Elevate Festival (Graz, March 2019)
St. Vitus (Greenpoint, June 2019)
Meakusma (Eupen, September 2019)
Kazerne (Basel, September 2019)
Market Hotel (Bushwick, October 2019)
Union Pool (Williamsburg, October 2019)