Vancouver, BC-based electronic musician connect_icut released his three cassette EP Music for Granular Synthesizer this month via Aagoo Records. Samuel Macklin follows up his two previous releases for the label, 2014’s Small Town By The Sea and 2013’s Crows & Kittiwakes Wheel & Come Again, with a 6-track collection that finds the artist transitioning from a digital environment to a hardware set-up, while simultaneously exploring the world of granular synthesis. A technique by which a particular sound source can be used to create clusters or clouds of audio events called “grains,” these small pieces can then be further processed by altering parameters like amplitude, modulation, and time stretching. Often employing a Casio SK-1 toy sampler for his source material, on Music for Granular Synthesizer Macklin creates spontaneous, improvised experiments that blur the lines between polar distinctions like analog/digital or natural/synthetic.
“Uridium” opens the collection with a hypnotic blur of stereo panning tones. Eerie hums and rusted resonances emanate from the dream-like fog before a sense of drift seems to accelerate the listener upwards. Eventually glitched digital fragments light up the darkening tonal cloud with noisy microbursts while a disembodied melody blows thru the jet stream. Like a meteorological meeting of high and low-pressure fronts, this environment grows electric causing these random digital fragments to gain sentience, and before long they collect into organized molecule strands that echo thru the swirling space. Even while heavily processed and abstract, “Uridium” still sounds organic and like a living event.
