get your aqueducts in a row -
Emperors of the Land of Inscrutability
After a flurry of releases in 2021 and 2022, neural goldberg (my duo with Chicago artist J. Soliday) is moving at a more stately pace. But we’ve got something new for you this week: Emperors of the Land of Inscrutability, available now via Bandcamp.
The new record is made using our signature method - running our generative audio systems side-by-side, listening to them as they clash, correlate, and cacophonize, and occasionally leaning in to tweak, encourage, and/or administer correction.
To my ear, the difference this time around is that there’s a touch more space in the music, especially in the second half of the record. The overall density remains high, but there’s a new quality to the variation of that density, a tendency to pause between the setup of the joke and the delivery of the punchline. Are we mellowing with age? Heh, good luck with that, but, in our characteristically perverse way, we’re exploring different kinds of dialogue and different forms of rhythm.
Please give it a spin, and grab yourself a copy of the bits. And while you’re there, check out J.’s other new record, slow cycles, which I will tease only by saying that it gives me intense August-in-Milwaukee flashbacks.
At the workbench
I spent a day in Queens in April, playing and recording with stellar percussionist Dennis Sullivan - a follow-up to previous sessions from September and November. (Previously, I wrote in this space about the September trip and the instrument-design ideas sparked by Dennis’ percussion-plus-electronics setup). We’ve now got an album’s worth of recordings and then some, and we’re concentrating on polishing the mixes.
Our latest session was primarily focused on fast, steady-tempo improvisations, with more than a little bit of RAWK. (If that sounds too conventional, rest assured that there were healthy doses of metric and polyrhythmic weirdness). The instrumental setup I brought with me was intended for that sort of playing - lots of drum machine-like features for playing, looping, layering, and manipulating rhythmic and polyrhythmic patterns. But the day’s results (and the aftermath of post-production) set me thinking about ways that I could push those ideas much farther.
And so I’m halfway into the design of yet another new instrument. There’s a new engine for rhythm and timing that lets me do some fairly ludicrous things with polyrhythm, Steve Reich-style phasing, and “quasi-Euclidean” rhythmic chains (e.g., 4 + 5 + 7 + 4…) while still keeping multiple layers in sync. There’s a new user interface that lets me reach into a repeating pattern and quickly make a variety of different changes to its elements, one-by-one. (“You get a glissando! You get a filter envelope! You get a timbre change!” Etc. etc.). There’s also a lot left to do - especially around sound synthesis and voicing, which right now are good-enough-for-testing-the-user-interface (which is to say… nowhere near good enough). But that’s a pleasurable kind of work, and I’m looking forward to digging in.
Nonce
“Rubber duckie, you’re the one / you make sampling so much fun…” (Stalwart cartoonist John Granzow wishes to assure you that only imaginary petroleum products were harmed in the creation of this scenario. For my part, I am looking for a pair of trousers in the matching shade, so that I can re-enact this scene properly).
Thanks as always for listening and reading - yours,
Christopher
Christopher Burns
sfsound.org/~cburns