In the last year or two, Alex Gray has taken his initial D/P/I impetus to “defamiliarize and disarrange our habituated experiences of the mundane” and fired fuckin’ double-boosters on the project, slicing through his own beat aesthetic on a splintered diagonal (08.DD.15) and honing his start-stop game to such a fine point (MN.ROY) that 40+ minutes of sound can flash by with the listener only ever hearing the “in-between,” an almost silent music of propulsive movement playing in our ears amidst the audio pileup. TMT LOVES IT.
So it makes sense (?) that the next step for D/P/I would involve another exponential leap in disarrangement, this time in the form of an album that is never just one thing: Ad Hocc (yep, that’s the title) will arrive as a 2GB USB drive containing six versions of the album (three “Fundamental” and three “Supplemental”) that have been run through various “random processes” and are themselves meant to be played in different combinations on multiple speakers (or separately if you’re boring). Sound sources for the album are divided into three categories: environmental field recordings from all over the world, abstracted samples of previously recorded music, and oscillators/LFOs/filters interacting with these sounds. There’s even an HTML file included; more information here.
Ad Hocc is up for pre-order today via Zona Music, a new L.A./NYC-based label that you may be familiar with through their cassette subsidiary, Zona Tapes, who released DarkTwaine’s EarthEmergency vol. 1 earlier this month. The USB album will be officially released on April 7.
• D/P/I: http://chanceimag.es
• Zona Music: http://zonamusic.org