What the resulting music would sound like coming from a pair like this one would’ve been your best guess over mine. On the one hand, we have “undersea acoustician” in audio engineer A.F. Jones, and on the other, laptop drone-guru Derek Rogers, two gripping fists in a fascinating aural handshake for Jason Lescalleet’s Glistening Examples imprint (which is on a major roll right now). These sculptures of sound always hit the ear with an air of ambiguity; where exactly did these tone pairs and clusters come from? And how exactly are they manipulated to create this unique version of musicality? Is this “written” in a “key?” To my ears, and with the visual evidence provided by Jones’s excellent video-mulch eye-feast for “Repetend / Mistones,” the duo makes instruments out of sheer electrical currents, wavelengths pitched together in concert, carefully sequenced, overlapped, and pitch-shifted to create harmonic beats and mild forms of melody before crumbling in on themselves in a pile of gyrating electrons. But as with many great compositions, the underlying notion here is one of growth, the music eventually taking on a life of its own that, despite its synthetic building blocks, feels unmistakably organic.
Repetend, Parallax is the name of the full release, a CD edition that will be available no sooner (or later) than March 24. Ahead of that, you can let your eyes cross themselves to the video below and pre-order it via Bandcamp. By the way, if you’re not wearing headphones, you’re probably doing it wrong — so fair warning there.
• Glistening Examples: http://glisteningexamples.com
• Derek Rogers: https://derekrogers.bandcamp.com
• A.F. Jones: http://laminalaudio.com
More about: A.F. Jones, Derek Rogers
