Ard Bit :: Music For Delirious Episodes (Phainomena/Shipwrec)

Music for Delirious Episodes brings together eleven compositions. Ard Bit is known for his delicate, almost brittle, works. This collection focuses on that same fragility that fascinates Janssen.

Layered and characterized with great detail

In 2011, Ard Janssen was one of the first musicians to grace Shipwrec. Now, some eleven years later, the sound sculptor returns for a full album on Phainomena. Music for Delirious Episodes brings together eleven compositions. Ard Bit is known for his delicate, almost brittle, works. This collection focuses on that same fragility that fascinates Janssen.

From the first steps of “Troubled Veil,” the listener is absorbed into a digital weave of field recordings, everyday undulations, other day modulations and loose harmony. Traditional instruments, string and wind, are filtered and re-imagined. The mundane echoes of routines are reborn as the percussive hum of pieces like “Stripped” and “Broken Respirator (White Funnel).” Behind the shifts and shuffles lurks something triumphal. Memories are given new form through audio carvings. Birdsong is handcrafted through knob tweaks, elephant trumpets bellow past swells of electronic insects as a glowing sun rises through the speaker. Hazes of static are shorn back, as in “Seppuku,” to allow moments of intense focus and reflection. And then we return, to that ephemeral beauty that permeates this record, with the final embrace of “Awakening Delusion.” An artist who finds the extraordinary in the often overlooked, or unheard.

Ard Bit is the artist project of Ard Janssen, a Rotterdam-based composer, sound designer and field recordist who creates audio sculptures which are subtle, layered and characterized with great detail. His musical forms come about through free improvisation and systematic composition with a focus on minimalism.

Director Jelmer Noordeman comments on the video:

“The track “Awakening Delusion” reminded me of a daydream in which different emotions, as it were, wipe each other out. With this I wanted to connect with the album title. The track consists of three stages. That’s how I approached the video. In the first phase one falls into the daydream, a second phase into a deeper state of cognitive activity, and a third awakening phase, where one awakens from that dream into the buzz of a public place. The magic of a bubble that inflates itself and will eventually disappear as quickly as it came.”

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Music For Delirious Episodes is available on Phainomena September 19, 2022 and pre-ordering is open. [Bandcamp]