Greenleaf explores such themes as AI, man-made lifeforms, artificial landscape and GM crops. Spores succeeds in being at once ironic/detached and serious/engaged, postmodern art work and polemical socio-cultural comment.
That’s the stock-in-trade of music producer/audio-visual artist, Paul Greenleaf, whose just-released Spores, with associated self-directed video, has an eye to our Anthropocene Age—a prevailing cultural backdrop of self-learning machines, driverless cars and the Internet of Things. Greenleaf explores such themes as AI, man-made lifeforms, artificial landscape and GM crops.
Raised in rural Lincolnshire, where sky and land are equally dominant, has led to a lifelong fascination with landscape, and the inter-relation between music and image; just as ‘landscape photography relies on the constant dialogue between the land and sky; producing music is a very similar activity, it’s about creating a narrative and building a context […].’
Greenleaf assembles material from various sources for his audio-visual work, the four Spores pieces variously characterized by degenerative melodic loops filtered through tape hiss and vinyl crackle. Digging through layers of detailed noise reveals ambient synth drones and arpeggios, with tracks secreting samples of IKEA drawers, gas hobs, and Suffolk-song (i.e. local field recordings!). The video, inspired by a news story about a Suffolk town that rejected a ‘fake tree’ phone mast as a blot on the landscape and potential health risk, is a sur-/hyper-real re-imagining where it becomes a sentient semi-autonomous organism endowed with artificial intelligence that self-propagates, releasing spores into the atmosphere.
Spores succeeds in being at once ironic/detached and serious/engaged, postmodern art work and polemical socio-cultural comment. The EP is available now via Paul Greenleaf’s Bandcamp.
