Suss Müsik

Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.

Condensation is a form of change, but this is only half of the story. Condensation is what happens when vapor transforms to a liquid state; evaporation is what happens when liquid changes back to vaporous form. It’s a constant, cyclical form of reclaiming what was lost.

Michael John Harris, author of the book The End of Absence, has an interesting perspective on loss vs. gain: “My child will never know the value of learning to read a map without GPS. This is the problem with losing lack: it’s nearly impossible to recall its value once it’s gone.“

Some cognitive scientists argue that digital media has rendered our brains into mush. Others believe that, like how the clouds above manage moisture content, it’s simply a matter of displacing one form of cognitive processing with another.

For this Junto project, Suss Müsik explored the cyclical nature of something being there and then not there. The original photo was scanned and rendered to high-contrast, which revealed two distinct patterns: the first a reasonably formed outline comprising a circle (we’ll call that v.1), the other a series of amorphous blobs (v.2).

v.1 became the basis for a cyclical riff played on fake bass and a DIY synth device. v.2 was played by tracing a finger across a DIY piezo mic resonator (constructed from old hard drive enclosures) and passing the signal through a Meng Qi Wingie 2. Some sloppy piano was overdubbed; interruptions were designed per interpretation of the “score.”

The piece is titled after Hieronimo Squarciafico, the 15th-century Venetian editor who warned that the invention of the printing press would inhibit humankind’s ability to remember things.

Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.

Any break or interruption in tempo might classify as a form of bond fission. To compose a piece that celebrates fracture as a creative element, Suss Müsik sought to understand how to locate bonds in non-musical terms. Enter Colorado School of Mines geochemistry professor Mark Eberhart, author of the book Why Things Break:

“Picture yourself flowing in space. Off the right and left are atomic nuclei. Neither can be seen, however, as each is surrounded by a dense cloud of electrons. Move up or down, backward or forward and, as if you were descending through a cloudbank, the fog diminishes. Alternatively, move toward one of the nuclei, and the electronic fog engulfing you becomes denser. Follow the path to the nucleus along with the electronic fog is densest and you are moving along the bond.”

That’s the approach Suss Müsik took with this weird piece for piano, fake strings, and rudimentary homemade synth. A simple, repetitive chord sequence was twinned on two instruments in 4/4 time. An occasional blip of piano arpeggios exceed the time signature while staying relatively in tempo.

Things bust loose midway through the piece, as the strings succumb to excessive glitch refactoring at a much higher tempo (moving toward the “nuclei” of the arpeggio tempo). Meanwhile, an electronic gadget burps in approval at the same rate. In true Sun Ra fashion, the piano tries to hold it all together before the primary chords resume their respective places, this time accompanied by a fake cello mirroring the arpeggios.

The piece is titled Homolysis, a form of fission by which each broken part of a bond retains fragments of the other.