Sensate Focus is a project by Sheffield-based artist and music producer Nigel Jacob, responding to the musical structures, techniques, vocabularies and sounds present in a collection of house musics produced in North America around 1992-1994.
Through a series of records (released in conjunction with Editions Mego) and “live” presentations, Sensate Focus addresses the division of music into repeatable patterns of observable and fixed duration; the placement of percussive events at specific points within patterns to demarcate distinct levels of temporal division; the organisation and repetition of patterns to form larger “arrangements”; and, strategies by which layers of instrumentation are introduced and removed.
For Jacob this exercise necessarily implies a response to the technological structures, techniques and vocabularies present in equipment within which they are constituted, and their functionality within specific social contexts.

nigel jacob richardson