cold genius discrete machines

cold genius discrete machines
Discrete machines is the name of a new project from sound artists Steve Jones and Sally Rodgers and Cold Genius is their debut
release.
In three distinct parts this suite of recordings begins with the title track Cold genius which is 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 distorted 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” and 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 berepeated 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 emphasized and where
there is a lot of energy in the shared spectra they become exaggerated while frequencies with little energy weaken and disappear.
cold genius discrete machines tracklisting
cold genius pt 1 cold genius cold genius pt 2 gutta-percha cold genius pt 3 room tone 7.53
8.14
8.37
Vu d’ici
seeing is forgetting the name of the thing zaum instantané lynch no birds pt 1 & 2 blackbird beat furrer an eye for an ear spots of time threefortyfour 1.03
3.30
3.41
1.19
6.23
1.31
2.28
2.24 5.33
1.43
Bedloe's teeth rain steam and broken light more voices below all in the valley frantic islands 1.40
2.49
3.40
7.05
1.16
Performed and produced by Steve Jones and Sally Rodgers.
Featuring guitarist, Martin Bowie and drummer, Nick McLeod.
p and c Other Records Ltd. 2011
c copyright control