My brother-in-law’s a sculptor. He’s into Rodin. There’s just something about Rodin that he gets, something that speaks to him. He’s got this thing for The Burghers of Calais — he’s just wild about that one. Perhaps he feels the deep sense of self-sacrifice inherent in the piece, the heroism in the face of almost certain death. Perhaps he’s confused by this display of bravery following humiliating defeat, and his attempts to process that conflict within himself has led him down a path of artistic expression.
But he’s also super into H. R. Giger, so of course most of his work looks like biomechanical superwomen or xenomorphs. Inner turmoil obliterated by a chestburster.
Birch Cooper and Brenna Murphy, the duo MSHR, are digital sculptors, fashioning pixelated monuments in code and sonic formations in circuitry. The video for “Wave Guide Edifice,” the lead track from their forthcoming (4/20!) tape Phased Trance Constructions on Unifactor, combines, seemingly effortlessly, the interplay between sight and sound. But what the hell am I looking at here? These glowing, ahem, edifices, these undulating waveforms, these bright structures, all triumphs of imagination, all projections of extraordinary insight.
All these things, born of the process of personal discovery, supernova’d outward in dense manifestation of intricate detail — no single idea is wasted, none is omitted. The noise and the form rage within MSHR, striving to connect! Or maybe that’s just whatever narcotic cocktail they’ve decided to ingest, who’s to say. Still, the synthesized soundscapes form the basis, the backbone, of the psychotropic workbench, undulating and pulsing with otherworldly energy. And again I ask: what the hell am I looking at here?
This isn’t Rodin. Or Giger.
These are abstract monuments to soundwaves, terraforming cassette players via magnetic tape interference.
Don’t you just want to be a part of that? You can. You will. There’s no reason not to. Use your imagination. Sculpt all kinds of crazy stuff in there. Phased Trance Constructions is your navigational matrix.
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