“This piece is a refraction of a reflection, a glitched-out re-wiring of a track from many years ago that was very dear to my heart. This pure computer music is always recorded as a live performance – I start in one configuration and through a process of poking and stroking the machines, and listening to how they respond, we end up in an entirely different sector of the soundscape. This journey was re-trod in altogether different slippers for a performance piece with my collaborator Sophie Seita, who trances out with hyperacademic text the same way I use sound – together we wove a multi-sensory tonic for the nervous system to score an emotive reading of Karl Marx’s astrological birth chart.”
Rhodri Karim, PKA Uther Moads, is an undisciplined multi-disciplinary artist-activist working to undermine consensus reality with sensuality, self-defeating behaviour and a friendly relationship with the occult. His work covers the domains of sound, performance, software, organising and therapeutic practice. As a practising animist, he uses technology less as a tool, choosing to engage instead in a conversation with technological collaborators. As a composer and sound designer, this means working in a trance state to facilitate improvisational dialogue with instruments, recordings and their spectral inhabitants.
Meanwhile, in the realm of the Real… everything is accelerating, this dark energy pushing apart the stars in an exuberant rush towards zero. The black sun radiates its NO for life to push against with its WHY NOT? ‘Bowls’ begins the task of reversing this process, the warm and silky firmament the backdrop for an eternal sunset, becoming ever brighter as every pinprick sun bursts into spontaneous supernovae, overloading the receivers in a joyous snowblindness / ecstatic overload. We find the narrator drifting in space without craft or protection, slowly precessing around a non-existent axis, cascading in a fibonacci spiral into a wormhole that leads ever inwards, ever onwards.
“Journeying is a word that I use to describe the experience of deep listening, and in journeying we throw a lasso around the wandering of the mind and ride it off into the transpersonal sunset. To be moved by sound, to give voice to the formless, to visit astral relatives that we never knew we had – that is the joy of journeying with sound. Unlike Brian Eno, I think ambient should be listened to at high volume, or at least this applies to drone. To explain drone I often refer to it as “hard ambient”. Non-negotiable music that exerts its own hypnotic pull on the willing, that lets emotion hang mid-air and spill out of the confines of form. Ambient is a gesture, the kind of soft and tentative impulse humanity must remember.”
Rhodri credits Jimmy Edgar with anointing him with the spirit of erotic glitch. Tim Hecker for his first moment weeping openly to recorded music, and Massive Attack for a space in which he says he can regularly weep openly at live gigs. When he was 15 he sat down and listened to Richard D James’ entire Analord series of EPs and his life was changed forever – he found the deep and abiding emotion in dance music, the humanity in repetition and atonality. He credits Biosphere for the suspense and suspended meaning and his friends and collaborators, Antidröm, Adi and more.
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