In the Philip K Dick novel Ubik, the recently (near) dead are kept in a dreamlike half-life and can be contacted by electronic means in a sort of funereal-séance-recording-studio. The half-lifers exist in an artificial environment, effectively living within a simulation. It is not immediately apparent to the (near) dead that they are in this situation, until the living explain. Like all of us, they are blind to the most essential truths of all.
This constructed environment is eventually taken over and forcefully de-evolved by a wayward teenager, and many of the half-lifers are drained of their remaining life. The archetypes of “cars”, “tape recorders”, “refrigerators” and “cigarettes” are taken back through different phases of existence. The rubber belts on a brand new tape recorder have already hardened and gone slack, the tobacco is stale.
The best medicine for this is a substance called Ubik, which temporarily reverses the de-evolution process. But the artificially amplified entropy takes over eventually.
Imagining for a moment that drum machines as archetypes could de-evolve through earlier phases, what would an (electronic) snare drum be reduced to, a burst of gated noise? A hi-hat made from gated radio static? What about a kick drum, would a voltage spike into a band-pass filter be enough?
Appropriately enough the sounds of plucked phasers and formant filters are similar to ancient hand drums, or log drums even.
It seems completely natural that I also picked up voices from this set-up. There were always going to be ghosts hanging around once I’d started table-tapping, attracted like flies.
The next stage was knitting the de-evolved elements back into ordered patterns, healing them in the process, the molecular cloud emerging from the nozzle of a can of Ubik.
Clearly it’s more than that too, take a listen!
I’d like to dedicate this one to my own ghosts, who I miss.
Love, Richard ET x
“Fears that the entire world is turning into clotted milk, worn-out tape recorders plus other, further, as-yet-unglimpsed manifestations of decay… World deterioration of this regressive type is a normal experience of many half-lifers, especially in the early stages when ties to the real reality are still very strong. A sort of lingering universe is retained as a residual charge, experienced as a pseudo environment but highly unstable and unsupported by any ergic substructure.” Philip K Dick, 1969
credits
released July 30, 2019
Recorded spring-summer 2018 in the ET studio.
ET plays:
Vermona Perfourmer, Spring Reverb.
Moog Slim Phatty, Phaser, Ring Mod, Filter, Delay, Boost (as VCA), CP-251.
Koma Elektronik FT201, BD101.
Armstrong AM/FM long-wave radio (rosewood).
Panasonic personal cassette player / ghost radio.
Sonuus Wahoo (formant wah).
MXR Blue Box.
EHX Octave Multiplexer.
Muson Synthesizer (primitive synthesiser / sequencer).
Arturia Beatstep Pro.
ET is a musical project to investigate and explore electronic percussion through a harmolodic compositional process. ET
works mainly on analogue percussion (from butchered 70's drum machines to modern analogue drum synthesisers) creating skeletal webs of rhythm....more
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