Band: Those Darn Gnomes
Song: “Birds”
Album: Calling Whitetails To A Tuned Bow
Release Date: June 28th, 2019
Label: Nefarious Industries
Streaming exclusively via PopMatters.
Speaking of the album, frontman Christian Molenaar offers:
“Assembling Calling Whitetails To A Tuned Bow was a messy process; this album features a wider range of songwriting methods than any we’ve made before. While our previous records brewed dense blends of free improvisation and convoluted compositional techniques (serialist canons, tangled webs of counterpoint, aleatoric games to name a few), I knew I wanted to take things farther and try to incorporate more new ideas. To that end, I spent a good deal of this album’s gestation time on intricate sound design from unique sources: namely, slime mold.”
He elaborates:
“While writing this album and living in absolute filth I ended up accidentally cultivating slime mold (physarum) and, rather than simply cleaning my house like a functional human, I began researching tools to track the mold’s growth rates. Once the data was collected, I processed it in a variety of ways to transform it into music, from feeding it to synthesizers as raw MIDI information to creating complex generative music programs in Pure Data and Max. The resulting noise formed the foundation around which much of Calling Whitetails To A Tuned Bow was based. ‘Birds’ is the album’s opening statement and serves to tease what’s to come throughout the rest of the album; layers of collapsing instrumentation collide with otherworldly electronic noise over the course of epic-length pieces. This record contains a lot of surprises, but ‘Birds’ teases a few early on.”
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