ARTIST PROJECT: Strange Developments
Something a little different this week! For the past several years I’ve been working on an album in my spare time; over the weekend I finally finished it. It’s called Strange Developments, and it’s in the same sample-based genre that I’ve been in love with for as long as I can remember and have written about a few times already. It’s loud, noisy, foreboding at times, and full of beautiful and amazing sounds; it’s silly in places, serious in others, and it will make you think. I’m telling people it’s “an observation on these contemporary times” because that’s a good way of saying “It could be about anything” without actually sounding like you said that. If you can imagine a musical triangle with the vertices being John Oswald, Neil Cicierega, and that Eno / Byrne album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, my album would be right in the middle. You can’t buy a copy of it (I’ll never be able to sell it for obvious reasons), but if you’re intrigued, you can listen to it on Soundcloud and YouTube:
The Soundcloud version is in “mixtape” format (one long continuous track), and the YouTube version features a unique AI-generated image for each song. I don’t have much else to say about the music (I’d rather the music speaks for itself, and musicians are really bad about talking about their own art) other than it was enormous fun to make, the voice on track 10 is the Grimes AI reading parts of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, and the voice on track 12 is Tom Wolfe. I’d be happy to chat about it more via email and answer any other questions you might have. If you like plunderphonic music, this one might be your next favorite album!
