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.
Humans create tools to make tasks easier. When the tool no longer works as intended, we discard or repurpose it for another utility. Our relationship with technology is like a transactional ouroboros, our behaviors influenced by human imperfections that machines were designed to eliminate.
Computers distort the human-tool relationship, possibly due to their ephemerality in form factor and intended purpose. In merely a few decades, a machine that once encompassed an entire tabletop now rests comfortably in a jacket pocket. Tasks that once required several specialized instruments now reside in a single device. Such is the nature of our digital existence.
(If there were a moment in this narrative to insert a casual reference to AI, here it is).
We want our computers to improvise because humankind is always improvising, and we need our tools to respond to our shifting priorities. “Everything is always turning into something else,” wrote the poet Kenneth Koch. “As we’re sitting here talking, monkeys are jumping around in the trees, and waves are going across the Hudson, and new poets are being born, and covers are coming off books … I mean, all sorts of things are going on.”
For this piece, Suss Müsik interpreted form and structure through improvisational reconstitution. Handmade electronic devices, built from discarded 1990’s computer hardware and a hacked Glitch Storm bitmap sequencer, manipulated acoustic timbres from plucked cellos to create unpredictable looping patterns. These were iteratively refactored until the tonic and non-tonic diffused, suggesting a “broken” musicality that transgresses common assumptions of sonic beauty.
The piece is titled Ultracrepidarians, a word to describe a group of people who express strong opinions about something beyond their expertise.
If you enjoy this piece, you might be interested to know that Suss Müsik has released an EP of material based around this same creative process.
