Warlock of sonic invention Richard Devine is back with a new album, on Venetian Snares’ label. And from the first cut, you might be surprised.
Well, actually, that depends on your take on Richard. If his spastic leftfield space voyages past left your head spinning, if you couldn’t quite penetrate all those intentional forays into digital errors, you might be unprepared. But if you you were onboard for that complexity and chaos, if you heard the passion for what it is, then I think you’ll be all the more delighted by what’s coming next.
‘Sort\Lave’ comes to the Venetian Snares-driven sublabel of Planet Mu, Timesig.
That sounds like just, you know, oldschool IDM. But Richard teases us with something that takes that sonic edge and gives it mature forms, warm mixes, greater precision.
He’s gone from those first orbital missions to building a space station, in other words. (Space station indeed – the press materials are quick to point out the custom Eurorack system and two Nord G2 modulars. So yeah, now we get to hear the magnum opus from that system we’ve seen all over social media.)
The album itself is 2016-2017, which means I’m still eager to hear what live sets Richard has next. But this sounds already like a culmination of years of refined technique.
Here’s the text with his comments:
Sort\Lave features 12 tracks of intricate electronica that ranges from abrasive percussive experiments such as ‘Revsic‘ to ‘Astra’s dazzling juxtaposition of sounds and onto the radiant ambience of the album’s closer ‘Takara‘.
Talking about the album’s genesis Devine explains “I’ve been using modular synthesizers since I was 17, but have never written complete tracks using these newer systems. This was my first experiment to see if it would be possible and I probably spent about 5 years building up the systems that I used on this album.”
“I wanted the record to sound very different to my previous works which had been more cold, digital, clinical even, and had all been made using computers. The aim here was the complete opposite, to create something that felt very organic, detailed, spacious, big and warm and just as importantly, a record that you could put on and play all the way through that flowed in a seamless way.”
This new approach was to prove fruitful and enabled Devine to create music in an entirely new way. “I really wanted to break free from timeline-based music creation and do things with my hands on the fly,” he explains. “So the tracks are more like captured snapshot performances where I could experiment and play around with the idea of probability-based sequencing for every patch, string multiple sequencers together that would feed other sequencers to come up with interesting rhythms and melodies. It was really fun coming up with new sounds this way too, I felt like I created several I haven’t heard before with this album. Some of the tracks on the album were complete accidents and evolved from something that happened spontaneously. In the end I feel this is one of the best records I have released to date, so I’m very excited to share it with the world.”
Vinyl, digital. Preorders now:
on the Bleep / Planet Mu store
More to come.
Release date: November 2, 2018