Hard to believe it’s been over five years since Alex Gray started cyberfucking us here at TMT with his Heat Wave project. Since then, we’ve been gifted with an incredible body of music, whether from solo efforts like DJ Purple Image and Deep Magic, as a member of Sun Araw and Dreamcolour, or through his own imprints Chance Images and Deep Tapes. His D/P/I moniker has stuck around for years now, though, with albums such as Espresso Digital, MN.ROY, and last year’s USB release, Ad Hocc.
Gray’s latest is called Composer, and it marks the final release under D/P/I. Mastered by Rashad Becker at D+M, the album features seven prickly tracks, fragmented sound bits that sound like the digital after-effects of a fomenting unease, fraught with technological breakdown and failure. But it also feels like a lively, modular celebration of sound contours and their spontaneous, world-building implications. No “control” element this time around to guide listeners: the once digital plumage now the bird. Here’s how Gray describes it:
“Composer” is an album of rhythms that, once started, eventually completed themselves without much input from the “Composer”. The character of a rhythm can develop very simply/unconsciously with just a slightly different part of the hand hitting a drum, or the wrist getting tired, causing trembling and stuttering that further magnifies the rhythmic stability of the pattern and/or player. With electronics, it’s different physically, as you are not “hitting” anything, but the link to the subconscious/unconscious, remains analogous. Every adjustment to a single sound/pattern can reveal complexities that were not apparent when the sound/pattern started. A natural flow begins, similar to the development of complex accents via “human error” of using an ordinary djembe or conga: as the composer begins to inter-be entranced by the sound/pattern, with a midi-mapped set of physical knobs, controlling complex processes/effects - each effect/process assumes it’s own character for that, almost quantum-like, layer of improvisation - layer by layer, until the simple layers of sound/patterns have naturally developed into compositions that reflect the seeming-instability, excitement, and sadness in time, here referred to as a fixed, unmoving element in the “universe”, that our human software is intrinsically dependent on to interpret these rhythms and the rest of the material world. This album was fun, exciting and unpredictable until the day it was “finished”. I hope this album encourages people to think for themselves. This isn’t a “techno”, “experimental”, “abstract”, “dance”, “IDM”, or any “genre” of album. I hope you know what I mean. I hope that music hasn’t lost the quality of inter-being “beyond categorization”. I also hope that, to a small extent, this album can act as a beacon of creativity for future generations, who are currently being completely saturated by marketing content for products and media that will do nothing but confuse and distract them.
Composer is out September 9 on vinyl and CD via Shelter Press. Pre-order the album here and listen to the album’s final track, “Pattern/WAYTA?,” below.
Composer tracklist:
01. Poly-
02. Semantics
03. Image Furnace
04. Ecstatics
05. Escape
06. Acid
07. Pattern/WAYTA?
More about: Alex Gray, D/P/I, Deep Magic, DJ Purple Image, Dreamcolour, Heat Wave, Sun Araw
