Discrete Machines (a man called adam). Cold Genius

Discrete machines es el nombre del último proyecto de los artistas sonoros Steve Jones y Sally Rodgers. Cold Genius su primer trabajo bajo esta denominación.

In three distinct parts, this suite of recordings begins with the title track Cold Genius, inspired by a famous scene in the poet John Drydon’s semi-opera of 1684 “King Arthur or, the British Worthy”. Set to music by Henry Purcell, the work modulates across an incredible range of keys during a very short space of time. Here however the score is played very slowly and using spectral freezing techniques to elongate each chord the temporal domains are distended to leave only ghosts of the original. Incorporating accidental sound and glacial voices the result is a haunted evocation of the ‘Cold Genius’ – the spirit of winter.

In ‘The Thinking Ear” R Murray Schafer describes improvisation as “music that’s never finished”. This second set of recordings are taken from sessions of freely improvised music-making with guitarist Martin Bowie and drummer Nick McLeod. With the barn doors of the studio wide open, sounds from the outside world have filtered into the texture of the recordings – the wind, birds, insects and the busy garage next door. Incorporating everyday materials as artistic resources; a broken zip drive, a flash gun, a saw, or the sounds of us moving around, picking up objects and re-positioning microphones, we bring musician, environment and apparently incompatible media into conversation. Captured and manipulated in real-time the resulting fragmentary, never-to be-repeated sound events are the equivalent of audio snapshots.

The third section is based on experiments in convolution, that is, the transformation of musical sound by filtering it through the spectrum of another sound. In this instance field recordings of nature and industry; thunder storms, steam trains, motors and broken light bulbs, are convolved with the musical sound of pianos, banjos, percussion and guitar, and the two waveforms multiply each spectrum to create new waveforms. Any prominent frequencies two sounds have in common become emphasised and where there is a lot of energy in the shared spectra they become exaggerated, while frequencies with little energy weaken and disappear.

©Discrete Machines | (A Man Called Adam)
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