YouTube: https://youtu.be/sZ1exi-i4uM
CS: https://ingrown.bandcamp.com/album/live-from-dirtmall

"The latest and most liquid offering by San Francisco-based experimentalist Chris Farstad aka 555 Sounds, Live From Dirtmall, takes its name from the venue it was created for: a virtual gallery set within an abandoned shopping mall. Inspired by ideas of juxtaposition, uncertainty, and the global commerce of detritus, the music follows an appropriately miasmic logic, oozing and percolating in surreal arrhythmias of electronic mirage. Mutating loops of Korg, Yamaha, and environmental texture crosshatch and refract through digital delay, equal parts playful and post-human, a 4th world fantasia as imagined by artificial intelligence.

In tandem with the audio Live From Dirtmall contains a visual counterpart, crafted using an array of psychedelic techniques, from oil and water dyes to stained glass, video synthesizers, crystal fragments, microscopes, plastic beads, FX software, and isopropyl alcohol. Rainbow waves of video feedback radiate and pixelate, strobing in time with abstract silhouettes among brief glimpses of circuitry, salt shakers, birds. Farstad cites the “G-rated surrealism” and subliminal messaging of Soviet animation from the 70's as a touchstone, guided by a veiled psychological arc rather than concrete narrative. Taken as a whole, the video serves as a transfixing, encrypted companion to the album, a compound eye rapture rippling with color, confusion, and complexity: “Matter into spirit, analog into digital, reassessing the value of each, forming a composite.” - Britt Brown

Audio: KORG MicroSampler, iPhone, Yamaha WX-7, Yamaha WT-11, Catalinbread CSIDMAN

Visual: Nikon D3300; Nikon Pb-5 macro bellows; oil & water dye; stained glass fragments; bismuth and selenite fragments; iPad visualizers: Matrix VR, Ions 2+, Uzu, Trippy Bird; "Waaave Pool" raspberry pi video synthesizer; Blender 3D; custom composite glitchbox; various MSDOS screensavers (eyecandyarchive.com); Aven video microscope; Mustool video microscope; Intellab magnetic stirrer; various glass receptacles; antique glass electrical line insulator; potassium polyacrylate "water gel"; plastic beads; isopropyl alcohol; mineral oil; excerpt of Exodus (1991) video game; excerpt of Sylvia Massey electrocuting a pickle; Adobe Premiere Pro.

Tattering all flags; geological singularity & non-dimensional score - Live From Dirtmall (2021)

Equipment: 
Casio AT-1 
Electro-Harmonix Holy Stain 
Roland SP-202 
Digitech JamMan 
Digitech Whammy 
Boss ODB-3 
Boss DD-6 (2) 
TC Electronics Flashback x4 
Hagstrom II Electric Guitar 
Carnatic Flutes (Percussion + Instrumentation) 
AKG "Sport-Series" Wireless Microphone
credits
released May 4, 2016 

Designed by Nico Stephou in Amsterdam. 
Released by MJMJ Records in 2016. 

s/o to TR Mahalingam — sampled on Track 7. 

All sounds by Chris Farstad / 555. 

Thanks to all of everything.
tags

Thee Omega Seed

Fossil Nemesis

"Solar Express" is a production of Snackbar Industries United and 555. 

Transmitted Jan 2013 CE New Orleans, LA 

Equipment: 
Apple iPad 2nd Gen. 
Roland TR-626 
BOSS DD-6 
MXR Phase-90 
KORG MicroKorg XL
credits
released January 1, 2013 

Art / Design: Steve Rosborough

Solar Express

IED Intercept

released December 1, 2014 

Equipment: 
Apple iPad 2nd Gen 
KORG Wavestation 
Electro-Harmonix Holy Stain 
BOSS DD-6 
Gemeinhardt 2SP Flute 
"G" Bansuri 
KORG MicroKorgXL 

"With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums, I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons." -Walt Whitman

555 SOUNDS / 5k candle

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