After landing (back) in New York City in 2018 following a series of catastrophic Visa breakdowns in Australia (which forced my family to relocate, quickly, to the other side of the planet for the second time in 5 years) I found myself going to the Brooklyn neighborhood dance clubs more & more often. The Generators & Redactions projects had started to wind down & after a series of great experiences at The Labyrinth and Unsound festivals, I reconnected with so much of the music from my youth & began to forge a pair of performance solutions that reflected my love of both algorithmic & systems-music alongside the timbral palette of “Golden Era” techno/electro.
The first element in this suite was a series of “Gridwork” engines created in Max-MSP that allow for real-time transient-analysis & on-the-fly rearrangement of virtually any signals in the audio domain. The year spent playing in a duo formation with Mark Fell had put all kinds of ideas in my head about how to decentralize & structure improvised rhythmic music going forward, and during a 2016 residency at Banff I had put in the ground-work, developing the wireframe of a contemporary engine to achieve this in a manner of weeks.
In a parallel development, in mid-2018 I began reconfiguring the same Eurorack Modular system used to record the “Generatorss” material, incorporating a series of basic timbral blocks, each beyond familiar: the zap-squelch of the envelope-filter circuit of the Roland TB-303 (modeled gorgeously in Euro by Eowave), a series of General MIDI PCM datasets (the Roland U-220 palette of my youth via via the Expert Sleepers General CV, along with decent simulacra of the Casio RZ-1 famously heard on Steve Poindexter’s “Computer Madness” & “Work That Mothafucka,” & the Linn Drum), the misunderstood “SuperSaw” wavesets from so many terrible 90s trance failures (recontextualized and patched for polyphony via the Acid Rain Technology Chainsaw), a series of vicious polyphonic “Virtual Analogue” & Wavetable engines (an homage to the Access Virus & Waldorf Micro/Wave topologies, realized mostly with the 4MS Spherical Wavetable Navigator, which👨🍳) & even a lightweight vocoder engine (ditto, Andrew’s disting). After a couple of test-runs in Australia, I christened all of this the Acid Causality suite after spending a great evening with Peter Rehberg [R.I.P.] & Russell Haswell in Basel in late September 2019; keeping in mind the multitude of connotations & contexts this phraseology holds.
At the awkward transition of hemispheres, I managed to squeeze in a handful of concerts of this music at the most bizarre of places (the famed Greenpoint Metal Bar St. Vitus hosted a particularly odd Monday night culmintaing in Nuclear Death Wish annihilating their borrowed instruments; a lively Market Hotel marathon organized around Bonnie Baxter & Hisham Bharoocha’s Kill Alters made much more sense, as did a Union Pool gig supporting old friend Luke “Helm” Younger; a going-away set opening for Rashad Becker in Northcote & another at the Tote with Primitive Calculators; even a festival appearance inside a dungeon at the top of the Dom Im Berg in Graz sandwiched between François “Kassel Jaeger” Bonnet & Ewa Justka, which was perfect) all of which proved to be fortuitous; the world had other plans come late February 2020 & the whole project ground to a halt without a trace, save for a few stray examples put up on Soundcloud & YouTube™. In a panic I began liquidating most of the Eurorack modular synthesizer hardware used in exchange for utility & grocery money as the pandemic kicked into high gear, long before the Stimulus/CARES schemes went into effect.
Around mid-March, Sanna Almajedi of e-flux got in touch about assembling a mix for their shuttered bar/restaurant/venue Bar Laika; one of my most frequented spaces, only a few blocks away from home. I leapt at the chance, and put together an hourlong blend (embedded to your right/below) of vocoded & “Resonated” home recordings in this vein from the prior year, which seemed to really get the music out there in a wonderful way. This triggered Calum Gunn of Conditional fame to write in about realizing a pair of cassette releases (a “Hi-Fi” selection of studio-recorded work & a “Lo-Fi” one of live takes recorded, largely with a tiny Sony PCM recorder & iPhone mics in-situ) which he then single-handedly collated, assessed, selected, edited, sequenced, and mastered over a 2-month period (everyone knows this is my Achilles’ heel, whittling down music into a sensible album-length program; Calum gets the collaborator-of-the-decade award, for sure). While our aims were true, in the end I only got as far as designing O-Cards to wrap around custom Black-on-Black Norelco boxes (the latter of which I gleefully custom-ordered from Jerry at AmTech in a quantity ranging in the lower quadruple digits, which then sat in their boxes for 3 years) before a series of personal setbacks & triumphs on both sides put the entire affair on ice.
In late 2022, as the last of a trilogy of LP “Reissues” (curated by Goat / YPY’s Hino Koshiro for his Nakid label, P&D’ed by Boomkat) of recent recordings I’d either posted on Bandcamp (R.I.P.) or manufactured as a “Private” Hi-Res AUDIO cassette, the majority of my performance in Eupen was issued as “Meakusma (Generators)” [NKD05]; I was reticent to use the AC designation given that I’d yet to frame it all, but honestly that’s splitting hairs; the long B-Side climax of Spherical Wavetable Navigator wrangling & the acid buildup towards it are certainly in & of this particular lane, if not exactly a stellar example (hey, I’ll own it).
I’ve resumed (September 2023) assembling the hardware systems following a period of relative inter-personal & life-structural calm, and with the goodwill gained in the summer-long second honeymoon of the Playthroughs ideas in hardware, I’ve started recording again in this more timeless-pulse-oriented vein. The beleaguered (H) & (L) titles have just gone live on all of the streaming apps & platforms at almost exactly the 3-year anniversary of the finalization of the masters, with Calum’s blessing; have at it!