We find it all confusing and compelling at the same time. A serious snapshot through our day-to-day lives and the mundane commercial messaging that unfortunately is part-and-parcel of corporate powerhouse greed taking over our devices.
An engulfing audio collage
What an engulfing audio collage. The bizarre and kaleidoscopic Composer REACTS / After These Messages release by David Curington—on the Difficult Art And Music imprint—is a sensory overload of sound and vision. The album “offers an uncomfortable glimpse into the hyper-mediated nature of our contemporary lives,” as stated in the press announcement, and we couldn’t agree more. David Curington takes a cross-sectional cut through a wide range of TV and social media advertising, “to create tracks lying somewhere between composition, improvisation and non-functional marketing that would be of no use to any corporation, ever.”
Well-suited for fans of old-school, sample-heavy outfits like Meat Beat Manifesto, Coldcut, Emergency Broadcast Network, V/Vm’s classic “noise and plunderphonics,” as well as The Caretaker, Alva Noto, Arthur Lispett, and others exposing blistered electronics and sampling—Composer REACTS / After These Messages drives the message home.
Field recordings, unprocessed samples that overlap, and skewed voice clips from a variety of sources are all incorporated into this massive project, which seems to evolve into dysfunctional, non-musical forms. While Curington’s baffling assortment of fractured and intermittent noises meander and interlock, somewhere around the halfway point, “The E Flat Triad” discovers ambient synth strands before descending into unsettling sonic splicing, while the lead track “Furnished Buttresses” finds a distorted alarm signal and impacting samples that transport us back to MBM’s At The Center album (Thirsty Ear, 2005) which included the unusually awkward yet gratifying “Want Ads” version 1 and 2. However, Curington’s audio-visual works have a far more raw and manipulated trajectory. Have a listen to “BURN FOR BETTER,” which features distorted and hazy overlapping messages, or “Useless,” which produces a static glitch infusion and surreal experience we simply can’t stop listening to.
We find it all confusing and compelling at the same time. A serious snapshot through our day-to-day lives and the mundane commercial messaging that unfortunately is part-and-parcel of corporate powerhouse greed taking over our devices.
- Having a product to sell;
- Clear and precise messaging;
- Not making your potential customers listen to the sound of someone using the toilet
for 8 minutes; - Not burning the customer’s face.
Composer REACTS / After These Messages is available on Difficult Art and Music August 21, 2024. [Bandcamp]
