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.
Concrete is all structure with very little aesthetic appeal. Wallpaper, on the other hand, is all visual aesthetics with no structure. What concrete and wallpaper have in common is they both crack. The cracks that emerge destroy the structural foundation of concrete and the visual appeal of wallpaper.
“For almost everyone, the word ‘structure’ evokes a strong visual of something that has been built,” wrote Mark Eberhart in his book Why Things Break. “A civil engineer fashions designs from a palette of I-beams, reinforcing rod, and concrete … yet simply putting things together from the appropriate palette does not qualify one as an engineer.” You might be thinking this same rationale disqualifies Suss Müsik from having anything to do with musical composition. No argument here.
Anyway, Suss Müsik approached this project with the intent of exploring composition as a palette of sounds. The ‘concrete’ elements comprise a blocky phrase performed on strings and Moog synthesizer. The ‘wallpaper’ component is a nonstructural mess that has no beginning or end, requiring the buttress of a flat surface (percussion) in order to display its intent. The piece was performed live from two laptops and recorded quickly to 8-track, minus overdubbed percussion.
The piece is titled Synovial, named after the fluid that lubricates joints in the human body and allows us to crack our knuckles.