Ongoing: Tendencyitis – AA0020
INDEX:
1: 13 January 2019
2: 16 January 2019
Flicked spittle, scrunched aluminium foil, choirs of ripped fabric, the squeaks of shuffling polystyrene blocks. I pull all of these textures out of the landfill of mixer feedback, and then mutter to myself about how it’s “remarkable that anyone could want to throw away a perfectly good one of these!” The first of these two pieces is pure dancefloor fuel: loops salvaged from tattered sheets of static and electronic whimpers draped off the stereo edges like earrings, driven by a bass drum that sounds like a steel-capped boot kicking a plastic drainpipe. Yet despite its coarse appearance, dance music is all about movement – it stalls teasingly at the brink of the drop, collapses into rhythmic remnants and rebuilds itself, slides elegantly into half-time. A most dextrous reconstitution of waste material.
The second track is just as rich in groove, albeit written in the fault lines that run along the blocks of static. A dialogue becomes apparent between the stammering hiss in the background and the gunk that splatters the fore, skipping along in light-footed syncopated steps. There is immense tension here. The noise starts to sound like a photocopier forced into reverse by hand, the various mechanisms screaming as they press themselves into my palms. Unlike the first track this is a brittle and unstable thing, forever resisting the shape that tendencyitis has wrenched it into. Both tracks, I should add, are wonderful.
There’s the raw sound and me, with nothing in between. When listening over headphones, the effect is peculiar – the sound feels so incredibly close, as if sparked from the circuitry within the headphones themselves. The screams of crossed-wire faults. The crackles of dulled copper. These digital scraps gather mass, the edges hardening into crust, and they reach my ears as tactile sensations rather than sounds: an experience often more akin to holding objects while blindfolded rather than an act of listening, feeling the abrasion against the inside of my head, gathering wounds in each ear canal. The second track drags its gnawed nails across me as if anxiously fidgeting, rhythmic only for the therapeutic soothe of acting repetitiously. When it ends, I can almost feel the blood drying across my cochlea.
