An interview with Peter Lamborn Wilson (1945-2022), aka Hakim Bey, poet, mystic, anarchist and originator of the idea of the temporary autonomous zone.

Hakim Bey

Hakim Bey Interview - 24 February 2011

Asqus - Flaut

Asqus - Music for 18 RCA Cables

The basis of this piece is a set of field recordings of a stream underneath a storm drain near my old house. It was a rather cold and grey morning; you can still hear the occasional bird call though.

The crackling rhythmic elements are provided by a generative patch constructed on a Clavia Nord Micro Modular, a device that allows you to construct virtual modular audio generators. I use the Nord (now a G2X) extensively for this kind of 'autopoietic' work.


Long Cold Days

Flaut is based on a particularly unconventional field recording - as an experiment I left my minidisc player in a freezer for an hour or two and was pleasantly surprised at the spacious glacial tones that resulted.

The flute type sound in the track is just a clip from a live jam on one of my synthesizers (I forget which) that I particularly liked.

There is also a brief interlude of semi-glitchy beats composed in the Renoise sequencer software.

Flaut

Almost all the sounds used in this piece are recordings of unwanted noise produced by my very old, rather rusty Korg MS20, an old patch-cable analogue synth.

The music follows pseudo-fractalline principles: once I had composed the basic structure I rendered several recordings of the skeletal piece and then played these as instruments over it; because of this, several of the short melodic sounds you hear are in fact variations of the entire song playing within itself.


Rusty Sockets

These two compositions were inspired by an evocative mid-90's breakbeat track of  the same name composed by my good friend Clifford Swindells (aka Electric Sheep/Wintermute), who taught me to make music in the early 90's and sadly passed away a few years ago. I hope he would have enjoyed my drastic reworking of one of his finest tracks.

Most of the percussion in the first part (which is kind of a prelude to the second part) is from a bunch of pots and pans I banged around on with my mate Paul.

Mid-Atlantic 2007 pt. 2

The basis of this simple piece is a live-ish jam on an ethnic VST instrument along with a rudimentary beat structure; I then fed everything through that most overused of electronic music plugins, dBlue Glitch. 

To avoid a predictable outcome I used randomisation envelopes on some of the key parameters; I then rendered many versions of the track, each slightly different, and selected what I considered the most aesthetically pleasing offspring.


The Great Peppermint Cure

Like the chance meeting of a one-fingered Harold Budd and a drunk Brian Eno. I composed this ambient piece late one evening whilst waiting for a friend to arrive to take me out.


Next Ice Age

This is a recording of a banging live gig I performed in 2002 at a music festival called Arcadia, the aim of which was to raise money for the San/Bushman people. Mabi Thobejane, the percussionist from Juno Reactor jammed along with my set, which was awesome; unfortunately only my line out was recorded, not his drumming.

PS: This live set is much older than, and completely different from, my other tracks available on Soundcloud. I think it gets good from about 20 minutes in....


Asqus - live at Arcadia 3

Electronica, experimental, IDM, glitch, autopoiesis.
  

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