James Ginzburg’s career to date has spanned a wide variety of genres, from the Jokeresque and thumpin’ “War Dub” under the name P Dutty (I guess P Diddy never claimed that variation) to his more recent experimental work as half of Emptyset, a collaboration with art curator Paul Purgas that explores the material qualities of sound in physical space and varying atmospheric conditions.
Ginzburg’s latest track, “a pattern, returned,” fits neatly into that conceptual space. It is at once hypnotic and enlivening, with a crystalline and dynamic set of sounds that somehow coalesces into something gently reassuring. It comes from six correlations, out Friday (October 18) but originally composed and commissioned for a performance in Berlin earlier this year, which considers the relationship between the organic and the digital, exploring what Ginzburg calls “the long slow goodbye to everything not integrated into the networked world.” As Ginzburg writes of “a pattern, returned”:
After sitting on a small bridge somewhere in the Scottish countryside and staring at a particular point in the stream passing underneath for a few minutes, the grass on the banks began to melt and flow like water as I turned my eyes towards it - my mind having transposed onto the land the flow of movement it was ignoring in order to interpret a particular moment in the current below and see it as still. The relative sense of what is static and what is dynamic seems to always be in a peculiarly fluid relationship, though rarely has such an uncertainty in what was and what wasn’t in motion been so clearly evoked for me.
If the goal was to carve out space for a new, harmonious relationship between the organic and the technological, Ginzburg has succeeded. As I listened through the track for the first time, willingly surrendering to its Ayurvedic whirling dervish drum circle mantras, I felt like I was snake charming my way through Irish pastoral scenes imagined entirely from non-memory and projected inside of my Oculus Rift. I thought, too, of this one time in Skyrim where I perched my hero on top of a mountain and looked out at the gorgeous(ly rendered) expanse. OK, I did that a lot.
Stream “a pattern, returned” below, and pre-order six correlations over at Bandcamp via Subtext Recordings.