Ben Carey - ANTIMATTER. LP

Ben Carey - ANTIMATTER. LP

LP: 45rpm
Deluxe film-laminated 'Tip-On' jackets by Stoughton Printing
Pressed by RTI
Limited to 500 copies worldwide
Includes download card

‘Three well-crafted gems of abstract electronic gestures... If Joan Miró’s biomorphs could sing, this is what they’d sound like’ - Todd Barton

Ben Carey is a Sydney-based saxophonist, composer and technologist. His practice is profoundly informed and extended by technology, through the creation of audio-visual works, the development of his interactive performance software: _derivations and more recently, his fixation on modular synthesis. Ben's work is driven by a fascination with the symbiotic relationships that develop between human and machine in composition and performance.
 
‘The three pieces on this record are the result of live interactions with complex and unwieldy networks of electricity, realised on a small eurorack modular synthesiser system in the studio sometime between late 2017 - mid 2018. Over the past few years this instrument has become a core part of my musical practice. For me, working with a modular synthesiser is about experiencing musical composition as an interactive process, where the lines between sound design, composition and improvisation are enticingly hazy.

The first two pieces are edited from longer improvised sessions on the instrument. ‘Peaks’ evolves from a single, restless microtonal line into a sea of metallic resonances and unstable bass snarls. Named after the Danish physicist Søren Absalon Larsen, the second work explores a gestural language based around audio feedback, the acoustic phenomenon he discovered. Feeding the outputs of filters, oscillators and amplifier circuits back into their inputs, ‘Larsen’ exploits the resultant textural, timbral and rhythmic instability of these chaotic vibrations. Finally, the long-form improvisation ‘Networks Articulated’ drives relentlessly forward through active surface textures to arrive at a monolithic, suspended noise-scape woven from un-synced oscillators, swirling filters and crackling analogue noise.’ - Ben Carey 

credits
released October 25, 2019

• Recorded and mixed by Ben Carey
• Additional mixing and mastering by Lachlan Carrick
• Vinyl Cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin
• Design and Layout by WBYK