I like to listen to certain music with the assistance of a spectrograph sometimes. Like studying a score, it’s often a revealing experience, especially with music and sound art that likes to pack content all over the frequency spectrum and in densities that are difficult to navigate.
Monty Adkins‘ music isn’t quite in the same camp as the Florian Heckers of the world that inspired me to take up this practice in the first place, but there is a high amount of detail in this slow moving piece – transformations to the sound happen at a rapid pace, in a narrative fashion. There are small stories inside every sequence of filter stutterings and rapid but subtle timbre shifts.
Jay Payne reinforces those stories by mapping them to light in a beautifully imprecise way – rays of color bounce and fuzz off of a nondescript globe that sometimes feels like its submerged deep in the ocean. This could be an entirely analog video, though my guess is its a bit of good work with Processing or a similar procedural video environment.
The same qualities are present in the music – this could be a meticulous analog piece; over-driven sound shifts accomplished in the painstaking fashions that folks like Stockhausen pioneered. I can imagine Kontakte-style banks of speakers on a mechanically controlled platter, spinning in complex patterns, Doppler shifts picked up by a matrix of microphones placed creatively. It’s probably at least in part a software creation as well, but I love that it’s not really obvious what is happening here – a lot goes down in both the time and frequency domain, but in the end the technique is a fun mystery to think through, but it’s not really important of course. Watch the synchronicity of this psychedelic Christmas ornament dancing along to bubbling synth gyrations and just enjoy the collisions.