4. You go back later to see. Flowers have bloomed, and they’ve turned to face the sun.
3. You plant the album on the grassy side of the frontage road where the exit feeds into your neighborhood. If anyone out there sees you and goes to scope it out after you leave, they wouldn’t even know what to do with it. You think they’d leave it be. “It’s like a coaster or something.” “Maybe it’s one of those geo-cash things.”
2. You order the plantable card for Mitral Transmissions, a new album comprising four pieces of music made by Greg Fox (Guardian Alien, Zs, GDFX, Ben Frost collabs, formerly Liturgy, etc.) to mimic and expand on his own cardiac rhythms.
1. You press play on this Soundcloud embed and listen to “Its OK” now.
2. Greg Fox squints at his computer screen as he programs intricate polyrhythms of sampled percussion and woodwinds. He adjusts the spatialization of the tones in the upper register again, panning a certain layer of chiming steel-drum melody further out to mingle with the lush electronic drones at the edges of the mix. A human heartbeat dictates the session’s pulse and intuition, looming as a patient murmur in the bass range, uniting a lattice of fluctuations into one slow, cresting breath.
3. Greg Fox straps on a bio-sensory interface that feeds data to Milford Graves’s computer.
[Graves] talks a lot about how the heartbeat contains all the rhythms that drummers play. He showed me during a session. He made a recording of my heartbeat and then we were looking at the waveform. The heartbeat has a lot more than just the ‘duh duh’ sound, there’s a lot going on you can’t hear, and he was zooming in one little part of the waveform and upped the gain, and all of a sudden you have a shuffle beat. It was like all the Casio keyboard preset rhythms are right there in the heart.
4. Greg Fox is born. His heart pumps blood through his limbs, abdomen, and brain for 28 years. He gets Milford Graves’ email address.
Mitral Transmissions will be available February 18 from Data Garden.
• Greg Fox: http://infinitelimbs.com
• Data Garden: http://datagarden.org
More about: Greg Fox
