Ah! Have a new album! To one very specific soul I never got to know, but from whom I certainly learned a lot: this, an exercise in color and loss, that gazes upon an unnerving horizon, is for you.

Check out "We Never Met" on all streaming services and stores.
Once again, I love you all. :)

www.cosmiclithium.com

We Never Met

[A few Failures, a new release, an explanation]

I've dedicated quite some time during this past year to the laborious task of filling out application forms for many, many artistic residencies, composition competitions and open calls organized by several respectable cultural institutions all across Europe. None of them have come to fruition. However (!!!), I refuse to let the resulting body of work go to waste, for you all might get a nice kick out of it. I certainly do.

This is kind of a weird release, really. While I've been delving for years into the aesthetic practices of glitch art, rarely do I find myself chopping conventional musical syntax as fiercely as I have for "Six Movements for the Disjointed Youth", for instance. Notwithstanding its structural ricketiness, the piece might still sound familiar to your ears, nonetheless, for it's built upon the shattered remains of the motivic and thematic material I'd developed for my (few and far between) 2024 live shows. At first glance, Yerevan appears to behave in a similar overanxious fashion, although its overall timbral palette and melodic attributes (pentaphonic patterns interlocking over heavily processed stringed instruments and mostly recognizable percussion) place the piece in a different sonic world altogether. Truth be told, you can easily hear that I'm an utter ignoramus when it comes to the musical history and culture of Armenia. But let's not dwell too much on the chosen title. I find it suits the piece, in its own peculiar and clumsily misleading ways.

As to what to say about "On Hope, Intrusive Thoughts, and Light", I have not the slightest clue. It stands as an unapologetically amorphous blob, from start to finish were it not for its carefully balanced yet unassertive tripartite design. Again, rarely, if ever, do I dip my toes in the open-ended voids of minimalism, or in the stillness of drone (so to speak), as explicitly as what's here revealed.

Anyways, I invite you all to celebrate Failures (now available on all streaming platforms). Reach your own conclusions on this somewhat atypical collection, elaborate your own critiques. I suspect I'll soon need to steer back towards more refreshing waters, and to allow for my compositional duties to be, once again, determined by the proper use of sequencers and piano rolls. But we'll just see.

Failures

[if gravity binds, other forces must surely repel]

"I felt free. Perhaps overwhelmed by an excess of compositional possibilities. I am suddenly reminded of the Russian Suprematists, but such a comparison does not seem appropriate here: do I set off from the conceptualization of a negative space that, in this case, I actually choose to fill? (First, is the distinction between negative space and positive space valid at all?)

Minimalist constructions: harmonic foundations reduced to three closely related chords that engulf a timid melodic surface; formal expansion bounded by the ubiquitous mechanism of strict repetition; timbre and dynamics, intertwined, the ultimate propellers of the musical discourse. I pay homage to all this, albeit from my own domain. For perhaps I do not know how to do it from any other." [Fibbbi]

---

Artwork by Olga S. Ortiz

www.cosmiclithium.com

Gravity that Binds

Caterina Barbieri - Gravity that Binds [Fibbbi Cover]

Distances have shortened, times have accelerated and our demands in this regard have sharpened. Multiplied cultural stimuli flash through our memory with little effort, blurred into amorphous balls of noise. Some of us, from time to time, seek refuge or consolidate the resulting sensory fog –we do not always pursue the same goals– wherever the most exacerbated physiological appetites of our particular musical preferences appear to take control. We try to indulge in the dance, as much as the angst of our days permits. We need occasional bursts of aesthetic disconnection and reconnection. Lastly, if possible, we need these to operate at a cautious distance from the spaces and times of ordinary affairs.

www.cosmiclithium.com

Multiple Technoo and Its Broken Spizs These Ain't

Technoo 140

A few weeks ago, my friends from Breakfast Club at Radio Relativa invited me to participate in one of their episodes. I was so grateful for the offer that I got cocky, and have now ended up with this: two hours of new and semi-new (but unreleased) music, a couple of rehashes from my own back catalog, and some tweaked samples thrown into the mix (homages, celebrations, favorite musics!).

Here are some qualifiers, descriptive witticisms, for Destructive Editing, so titled:

- ambitious;
- colorful, melodically opulent (and cutesy and tender);
- tumultuous, polymorphous, but somehow coherent after all (the music wanders off course for minutes at a time, but carries on forward, optimistic that it will soon arrive at the next clearing);
- irregular, hectic at times and languid or meditative at other times;
- personal and intimate, without falling into the autobiographical or programmatic.

I’ll shut up, but not before sending massive thanks to Breakfast Club, to Radio Relativa, and, as always, to all of you who listen. :3 :3 :3

www.cosmiclithium.com

Destructive Editing

Destructive Editing [Breakfast Club Radioshow #42]

But I Still Wept for You I

But I Still Wept for You II

But I Still Wept For You II

But I Still Wept for You III

But I Still Wept For You III

But I Still Wept for You IV

But I Still Wept For You IV

But I Still Wept for You V

But I Still Wept For You V

Life brought me closer to the ways of the string quartet during this past year. Here's my neurotic attempt at one: my latest sonic contradiction, accompanied by linguistic gymnastics, presented to you in square aspect ratio. If this all sounds just a bit weird, it doesn't sound weird enough.

Check out "Strng Qrtet" on all streaming services and stores.

www.cosmiclithium.com

Strng Qrtet

Six Movements for the Disjointed Youth I

Six Movements for the Disjointed Youth II

Six Movements for the Disjointed Youth III

Six Movements for the Disjointed Youth IV

Six Movements for the Disjointed Youth V

Six Movements for the Disjointed Youth VI

Yerevan

On Hope, Intrusive Thoughts, and Light A

On Hope, Intrusive Thoughts, and Light B

On Hope, Intrusive Thoughts, and Light C

Three Exercises in Lassitude

Synthetic Flux No. 1

AUT (Take Her to the Moon for Me)

mx7 01

Menuetto

An Ephemeral Sack of Particles that Thinks Itself Eternal

I'm an Idiot

Phthalocyanine Blue BN

Album: Minimal Tendencies, Anemone Fields [31/10]
Track 1

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Minimal Tendencies, Anemone Fields

Fore

Album: Minimal Tendencies, Anemone Fields [31/10]
Track 2

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Gyri

Album: Minimal Tendencies, Anemone Fields [31/10]
Track 3

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Adam

Album: Minimal Tendencies, Anemone Fields [31/10]
Track 5

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FosB

Album: Minimal Tendencies, Anemone Fields [31/10]
Track 6

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Gone

[Version 2]

---

"The sound object, represented most dramatically by the romantic symphonies of the nineteenth century, has been fractured and remade into a shifting, open lattice on which new ideas can hang, or through which they can pass and interweave. This is one metaphor. Landscape is another—a conjured place through which the music moves and in which the listener can wander." [TOOP, David: Ocean of Sound, 1995]

---

Kerban is tired of accumulating sketch after sketch of fruitless artistic projects, of schematizing infinite spirals of contradictions and outlandish ideas around music's "diverse ontological complexities" (?), of "not lifting a finger" beyond the walls of the private sphere.

In an attempt to keep the compositional process as transparent as possible, the pieces that make up the Ursatz series will receive regular updates on YouTube (unlisted/previous versions can be found at https://www.youtube.com/user/cosmiclithium/playlists) and SoundCloud.

www.cosmiclithium.com

cosmic lithium

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