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Thank you Garfield. I always appreciate your willingness to check out everyone's work. It's nice to have an open-minded sounding board to try out different ideas.
For anyone who is interested, here’s my rough explanation of the concept behind this current project:
The idea started a few years back when a colleague misunderstood a totally benign message that was sent via email, and that got me thinking about all of the layers of error that technology brings. For each different algorithm and layer of technology, new sources of error are introduced, often obscuring any meaning behind the intended message. These errors and algorithms limit what we see on social media, blind us to the human element on the other side of the screen, filter important information, and amplify misinformation. The videos I make are an exploration of that: A VHS tape (inherently flawed technology) run through multiple layers of circuit bent mixers into an old CRT TV which is recorded by an iPhone and transferred via Bluetooth to a laptop, edited in amateur software, compressed into YouTube’s algorithm, and further compressed by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. The modern technologies each further ruin the media. And yet we rely on them every day.
The music is my reaction to that. Most of the music I share is limited to one single take of me “performing” improvisationally with a predetermined set of sounds and rules. I may overdub one element or do some minor editing, but for the most part I just press “Record” once. I become the algorithm, and you get to hear my mistakes in real time through as few layers as possible. I make all of my music on limited, mostly outdated, hardware with a limited brain and limited talent. There’s no sparkly façade of professional software, editing or post-production tricks, or Autotune.
I tend to choose sounds and images that have a nostalgic vibe (for me), but any emotional subtext is purely subconscious and unintentional on my part. I’m sure you could unpack some of my psyche by analyzing my choices, but that would just add another layer of mistakes and uncertainty.
For this project, the errors are the point.