deep concentration, cuz I'm no comedian....  >=I

Artist: @fausto_mercier / @trngs
Catalogue Number: IM091
Album: I'm Too Sentient
Release Date: June 25th, 2021
Format: Digital

Stepping in as a musical match-maker, Infinite Machine has paired up Fausto Mercier & trngs, two boundary-pushing sound designers, for a fresh EP of kinetic and visceral electronics. The pair are well suited to be partners in crime on I'm Too Sentient: both share a meticulously detailed approach to sculpting sounds as well as a keen interest in producing a sonic ‘uncanny valley’ in their output - manipulating organic sounds until their source is barely recognisable.

Fausto Mercier opens up I'm Too Sentient with Overcorp, a dramatic opener which only seems to get more frantic over time. Unfolding like an algorithmic Fibonacci spiral, Fausto’s musical ideas seem to shrink and appear within each other like fractal patterns. Towards the end of the track, the low-end drops out and is replaced by moody pad synths, an uneasy palette cleanser that glides over fidgety samples that refuse to sit still.

Next up, Bite Nails II Assert Dominance is another cerebral hit of complex, polyrhythmic laptop music. The beginning of this track seems far more ‘on-grid’ than Overcorp, but we are lulled into a false sense of security by Fausto who starts nudging samples into unexpected phrasings or squeezing new sounds into inexplicably small gaps within his drum programming. A real head-spinner of a tune!

Fausto’s final offering from the split, O O Doomscrll is potentially the most frantic moment of I'm Too Sentient. Humanoid-esque synths seem to wail through the arrangement, backed up by a punishing delivery of drum hits and manipulated organic sounds. As the title seems to suggest, O O Doomscrll could almost be considered as a soundtrack for our age of digital disorientation and social anxiety.

trngs opens up his half of the split EP with Organic Fabrication Core, a sonic headfuck if ever there was one. Jammed full of ideas and operating at break-neck speeds, trngs background in improvisational free jazz definitely comes to prominence in tracks like these.

Next up, trngs keeps the tempos fast with I'm Too Sentient For My Own Wellbeing - a track which sounds a bit like if Mark Fell had a breakcore side project. Musical stutters and iterative loops are abruptly swapped out for aggy kick drums which cut through the mix like a knife. The name of this song, again, nods to our accelerated virtual culture and the pressures that our contemporary information-overload can exert on us.

Rounding off the split, trngs’ () %%% () is a curious experiment across multiple temporalities and textures. Starting off serene and calm, the production degrades and glitches-out like an alien fungi permeating an ambient music culture.

An enthralling exploration of modern laptop musicianship, I'm Too Sentient is probably unlike anything you will hear this year. We suggest you press play and hold on tight.

Artwork by trngs

Trngs - () %%% ()

With a background in playing jazz and formative years of playing saxophone in a live band, Prague-based Ursula Sereghy stepped out of the hustle to focus, all while becoming a regular at the local Synth Library. A space where she found the support of the musically and politically like-minded and could nourish her newfound passion for experimenting with machines and exploring the limitless possibilities of sound design. An extensive period of voluntary detachment from everyday life during the pandemic gave rise to the stunningly confident debut album 'OK Box' fabricated by this dark horse of a producer.

Opening 'OK Box' reveals a truly multifarious microcosm. On her very first musical output, besides manipulated field recordings and widely used granular synthesis, Ursula draws wisely from her past musical practice as acoustic or synthesized samples of jazz instruments become the furtive common denominator of the record's sonic narrative. Circulation of the breath among the instruments chambers substitutes the streams of city dwellers flowing through the cramped city environment. With Ursula's entangled compositions, she creates the representation of revealing and embracing the intuitive connections of the experiences and thoughts with their mental and physical surroundings, at times leading the listener to melancholic placements, followed by moments of mischievous clarity and rational sentiment. But essentially, the longplay is a friendly ride following unusual mental maps and broadening the borders of the very cartographical ones, all with inconspicuous sideroad peeks of cheeky little creatures, still surveillance by destiny-bending spirits, and oversaturation of out-there emotional associations. Hang in there, you little civilians and slimy slugs alike. To cut a long story short - 'OK Box' houses a lively collection of warm-hearted and witty jams honoring the nature of reasonable escapism. 

Written & produced by Ursula Sereghy
soundcloud.com/ursulasereghy

Mastered by Wim Dehaen
soundcloud.com/wimdehaen

Artwork by Jiri Macku
jirimacku.tumblr.com

G&P019 🎷

Ursula Sereghy - Pigeon

BAD FACE - Fast Song

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From a cassette/digital release on Deathbomb Arc, released in support of the clipping. / Baseck west coast tour 2017. Track premiere thanks to Tiny Mix Tapes: http://www.tinymixtapes.com/news/baseck-release-ep-and-head-out-tour-clipping-friday-premieres-new-track-today

Baseck is a Los Angeles based experimental electronic musician. His roots run deep in L.A.'s underground rave scene since the early 90s. Baseck’s fascination with sound brought him to turntablism at an early age. The attraction to hands-on hardware learned from scratching records lent its way to audio manipulation with small battery powered toys, drum machines, and then modular synthesizers. His unique style and mastery of a wide range of music hardware created a segue into music technology. Since 2013, Baseck has been working with synthesizer companies offering design concepts that will enhance user playability.  Dave Smith’s analog drum machine, Tempest, is released with presets designed by Baseck. Variatic Basicus, a Eurorack module created by Noise Engineering, was built for his live performance needs.  

At the peak of his performance, Baseck's style builds on past musical experiments combining 80s drum machine sounds of Breakdance and Industrial, with a future approach to Drum & Bass and Braindance using analog/digital hardware.

Erisfall

BASECK "ERISFALL (FT. FEELAHOLIC)"

Eyre

https://riantreanor.bandcamp.com/album/file-under-uk-metaplasm

Rian Treanor returns to Planet Mu for his second album "File Under UK Metaplasm".

In 2018, Treanor left his home of Rotherham, a working class town in the North of England not far from rave nexus Sheffield, and headed to Uganda. He'd been booked to perform at Nyege Nyege festival, a mythical event that takes place on the shores of Lake Victoria in Jinja once a year. After nearly a week of almost non-stop syncopated bass, Treanor drove to the country's capital city Kampala to produce music for a month at the Nyege Nyege's Boutique Studio - an incubator that serves as a central hub for the record label and its many harmonic ventures.

A week later, while he was performing at Hollywood, the tiny dive bar that housed the Nyege Nyege crew's first events, Treanor began to think differently about the sound he'd been developing since 2015's acclaimed "A Rational Tangle". "Everyone was still beaming after the festival, full of energy and wanting it raw and fast," he explains. Treanor had been working on tracks with Acholi fiddle player Ocen James, and absorbing sounds from the other producers at the studio like Tanzania's Jay Mitta and Sisso and Glasgow experimental duo The Modern Institute. The result was a jerky blend of hybridized footwork and singeli (Tanzania's own lightning-fast dance sound) that clocked in at a rapid 200bpm. "I played a Jlin track at the wrong speed and it was about 225bpm," he admits. "But it sounded really good so I went with it. People were going mental, it was so much fun."

Arriving home, he used this experience to inspire a new chapter in his production process. Inspired by the singeli production process, he focused on energy, building tracks and exploring urgency as the guiding method. Over the course of the year Treanor perfected these ideas, building from raw ideas and eventually focusing on engineering the physicality of the sound. And at the end of 2019 he had the opportunity to tour Japan, where he was able to work out the finishing touches performing on some of the world's best soundsystems.

This polarity - the enigmatic, sweaty energy of singeli juxtaposed with slick, high-def bass weight - sits at the centre of "File Under UK Metaplasm", Treanor's second full-length. Opening track 'Hypnic Jerks' is maybe the perfect example of this, with crinkled percussive loops cut through by machine-gun kicks and acidic wobbles. Elsewhere, 'Vacuum Angle' takes Sheffield's Warp-ed legacy and brings it crashing into the future, with rhythms collapsing into static and noise but never deconstructing or losing the flow. 'Debouncing' meanwhile folds gliding square synths into rattling dancehall kicks, joining the dots between SND, Equiknoxx, Wiley and MCZO & Duke with a neon Sharpie.

"It's using all those formulaic dance structures but just slightly mangled or messed up," he says. "I'm still focused on making functioning dance music for clubs, but I'm really interested in how far you push that before it's just like - no."

BASECK "ERISFALL (FT. FEELAHOLIC)"

Deathbomb Arc

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