David Curington :: Composer REACTS / After These Messages (Difficult Art And Music)

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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.

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.

  1. Having a product to sell;
  2. Clear and precise messaging;
  3. Not making your potential customers listen to the sound of someone using the toilet
    for 8 minutes;
  4. Not burning the customer’s face.
 
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