Black Job - Dynamic Safety

Release Date - 22nd February 2019

Second release for the Decouple ][ Series, a project that aims to showcase artists working, in their own ways, at the bold fringes of electronic composition, experimenting around the topics of increasing complexity, dependencies and miscommunication in a media-saturated digital era.

British producers Dale Cornish and Sim Hutchins join the project, the former playing with an anti-sober, almost eccentric euphoria, the latter with nostalgic and slighty eerie ambient feel. The thinness of reality is made of transparent things and refractions – external and internal points of view of the same subject.

Croydon’s prodigy Dale Cornish joyously plays here with a terse, oblique, abstract, almost candid, almost brutal TR- 909’s ‘floor friendly pattern. Not immune to unpredictable subtle fractures, the witty nine minutes of percussive repetition stretches out beyond its physical form, hinting at moments of climax but never overwhelming its voyeuristic nature. Saturated handclaps and hi-hat pan-pots widen top-end frequencies while classic 909 claves incursions, cowbells and tambourines counterpoint. What sounds like a recording of Dale’s own voice lasciviously recurs so to become the track’s title itself – ‘California’! Playfully pointillist explorations, pulse and percussive deconstructed gestures place this track into the elusive territory between dance-floor and experimental.

‘The product of a bleak winter night, cold fingers gripped tightly on restraint/release controls. Red wine sipped from a mug in lieu of adequate central heating. Stifled sense of euphoria inferred by subtle melodies not brave enough to visibly cross frozen pads, instead opting to lurk in the chill of closed hats and hollow bandpasses. Though unable to procure the resources required to stoke the internal flames of creative thought, I powered through instead and struck tipsily at chords, and at the red-skied February dawn ‘Druk Pak’ was the end result’. No better words than Sim Hutchins’ own to describe a tune of potential somnambulism, obscure awarness and future nostalgia for the present-day. Another time his vision, sounds and impulses set markers of contemporaneity.

All cover pictures for the Decouple ][ Series are taken from Alice Bonfanti’s ‘Transparent Things’ [1997] courtesy of the artist.

a1. Dale Cornish - California

b1. Sim Hutchins - Druk Pak

Release Date - 25th January 2019

In the search for new sound grammars, Wesqk Coast proposes a linguistic approach to music in which sounds are words, signs. As for a neo-language, informality, contamination, deviations and its gradual normalization trace the dynamics of control and re-absorption of expressive forms.

‘S.T.A.S.H. ?...well, there is no actual meaning behind the title’s acronym, I am interested in its cryptographic potential.. like language, music works through a combination of minor units, capable of unpacking an endless world of meanings...’

When asked to give some thoughts about his work, the reply was a slew of stock images and short quotes: text analytics, psychometrics, data storms, predictive technologies, ethics of psychological profiling... S.T.A.S.H. is revealed through rapid suggestions and music hybrids in which overload of inputs and frenetic absorption re- elaborate into a true personal stylistic mash – today’s media.

The digital ambient vocal pads and sparse rythmics of ‘Generation’ open to implode into the Bertoia-style metallic tones of splendid ‘Tek’, anticipating an album that developes as a continuum. Title track ‘S.T.A.S.H.’ starts from augmented computer game scenarios to collide, in second half, with extra-fast triggered rattling drums – everything reminds of Piteous Gate. Named after the infamous italian politics sex scandal, ‘Ruby Gates’ resonates with its thorny inspiration through a Twin Peaks sample-based sloppy melody and vocal interventions. The dream-like lullaby of ‘Aicha’ tests a different syntactic palette to break the tension and introduce the ancient-futurist voices and nervous rythmics of ‘Cane Rabbioso’. Melancholic and post-modern ‘Estate Nera’ slowly builds up like ambient and dismantles into a futuristic dub – word up.

a1. Wesqk Coast - Generation

a2. Wesqk Coast - Tek

a3. Wesqk Coast - S.T.A.S.H.

a4. Wesqk Coast - Ruby Gate [Twin Peaks Edit]

b1. Wesqk Coast - Aicha

b2. Wesqk Coast - Cane Rabbioso

b3. Wesqk Coast - Estate Nera

Release Date - 9th November 2018

OOH-sounds inaugurates a series of splits on the topics of increasing complexity, dependencies and miscommunication in a media-saturated digital era. Georgia / Bellows open the series shaping the two vinyl surfaces between futuristic eclecticism and avant-garde pan- aesthetics.

"In software engineering d e c o u p l i n g is generally all about discerning whether or not two components need to closely work together or can be further made independent. Independence is great because it makes those things easy to change or use somewhere else. Usually, you can't remove coupling between components completely. D e c o u p l i n g in that context normally means loosening the existing coupling, making sure each component knows as little as possible about the other components around it”.

The first in a series of split vinyls concerning dependencies, miscommunication and increasing complexity in our media- saturated digital era. Georgia and Bellows inaugurate the decouple ][ series with works between futuristic eclecticism and avant-garde pan-aesthetics, where musical themes flow tangentially. Similar, but without effectively engaging one another. A metaphor for a world of surfaces.

Recorded in Georgia’s Chinatown NYC studio, ‘Tiwala sa buani’ abruptly throw us into freaky percussion clusters constructed from heavily processed sounds which seem to keep in balance just by the magic of repetitions. Justin Tripp and Brian Close’s stylistic fusion acts like an antidote against GPS localization, with sounds and voices more reminiscent of data flowing through a proxy server than an acoustic performance - a myriad of tiny elements resonates with the multi-cultural a-geographic perception of a contemporary metropolis. ‘A Habitual Sway’ (an anagram of the first title) flows more slowly, mixing hypnotic rhythmic percussions loops, melodic sketches and controlled distortions into sophisticated layers. Naïve digital strings pads incursions widen the picture further. Georgia run an NTS monthly residency of oddball electronics.

Digging into their sound archive, Bellows build an immersive Konrad-esque 19 mins of humid and winding electronics with‘Untitled’. Drawing on years of improvising experience, Nicola Ratti and Giuseppe Ielasi take a puristic avant-garde approach, using tape loops, static, modular synths and field recordings. A subtle nostalgia pervades the whole work - the music sneaks through lush, decadent dystopian visions like in a travelogue. Mallets, statics, cut-up white noise, synthetic kiks and uncannily pitched voices branch out like roots, while digital birds whistle all around in an aquatic atmosphere, perhaps suggesting an ironic take on ‘orientalism’ - down to the river’s delta.

a1. Georgia - Tiwala Sa Buhay [vocals Gabi Asfour]

a2. Georgia - A Habitual Sway

b1. Bellows - Untitled

Released 25th May 2018

- VORONOI new release explores how sounds behave in aseptic experimental environment to discover a new present of digital fantasy.

- A work of precise and complex sound design that looks over the techno-scientific contemporary from a positive angle.

- Includes extended re-work track by Jesse Osborne-Lanthier who reassembles Vis-Viva’s sonic materials into his unique style.

- RIYL: Mark Fell, Lee Gamble, Gabor Lazar, MESH, Yves De Mey...

Vis-Viva is the surprise of movement, the wonder that leads to imagine new possible configurations of the present, objects created with materials not yet invented move in aseptic and virtual spaces without respecting the normal laws of physics. Used for the first description of kinetic energy in elastic collisions the historical term Vis-Viva titles second OOH-sounds release from VORONOI, a work inspired by post humanism literature, experimental observation and speculative evolutionism where sounds and motion seem to face over the contemporary techno-scientific corpus from a positive angle.

Can sounds behave like particles do? How sound reacts and transforms if treated like organic matter? VORONOI tries to answer back by sculpting a precise and complex sound design in an anti-climax approach to composition. Rhythms are free, unpredictable, tracks always seem to respect some grammars of club-music but abstracting from its normal timbres and denying its conclusions to face a digital fantasy.

Vis-Viva’s experiment is completed by an extended 6 minutes re-work track by electronic music producer and multidisciplinary artist Jesse Osborne-Lanthier (Halcyon Veil, Raster-Norton, WTN?) who reassembles VORONOI’s sonic palette into his unique style. The result is as if everything has traveled outside the lab to be exposed to the outside world.

T-1000’s suspended atmospheres set the Vis-Viva experiment with pulverized granular sound debris, occasional rhythmic pulses and reverberant movements. Built over two distinct parts, in which the second seems to deny the first, SPHERO 2.0 forces a dynamic dialogue between raw and ultra processed sonic material. Elements orbit around a fast and joyous drum pattern that builds up in Marbles, a more complex experiment in which particles slow down and accelerate in chaotic, though controlled, collisions to generate micro melodic bursts.

B-side opens with innovative artist Jesse Osborne-Lanthier who re-works Vis-Viva's raw recordings in an apparent disassembled hierarchy, layering the original sonic elements over an amazingly sounding, erratic texture made out of what sounds like iper-processed field recordings. Gumbody Flash closes with the slower, uncanny precision of an out-of-battery mechanism, whose degree of freedom decreases as its elastic repetitions get looser and contradictory.

a1. T-1000

a2. SPHERO 2.0

a3. Marbles

b1. V25 [Jesse Osborne-Lanthier re-work]

b2. Gumbody Flash

Released 3rd February 2017

1. V2

2. V3

3. V4

4. V4