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Since releasing his excellent Spectrum Spools LP Seed in 2014, Chicago’s Brett Naucke spent over two years working on a follow-up for the label, dubbed The Mansion. As he gathered sounds, he found himself going down more roads than one project could handle. “I farmed an absolutely crazy amount of material that didn’t fit the record at all,” Naucke says. “Ultimately it all had to be put by the wayside until the LP was finished.”
Once he was done with The Mansion—which comes out this fall—Naucke was free to explore some of those alternative paths, resulting in several releases that sound quite different from each other. In July, LA’s Nostilevo label released ESP Mirror, six tracks of hard-edged electronics that turned beats into noise and vice versa. He’s also just finished Operator Voices, a calmer but just as tense work which Naucke calls “probably the most far-out and unusual release in my catalog right now.”
The four pieces on Operator Voices, each lasting just under five minutes, are certainly hard to pin down. A lot happens in each track: fractured rhythms, whirring atmospheres, disembodied voices. “There was a big focus on getting a large amount of material in a small space comfortably, which can take on a lot of different emotions on multiple listens,” says Naucke. Yet Operator Voices exudes eerie chill, hinting at a hidden story that’s never actually revealed. “It might be the most non-narrative release in my discography and that was definitely intentional,” he insists. “The moods are really erratic and kind of alienating and foreign to me.”
Part of what makes Operator Voices unique for Naucke is the process he used to make it. Sounds sourced from synths and field recordings were arranged entirely in Max/MSP, the visual programming language that emerged in the late 1990s. Inspired by his friend, composer and Horse Lords bassist Max Eilbacher, Naucke chose Max/MSP to force himself out of old habits. The process he devised “ends up being a sort of hybrid between improvisation of a large sound pool that has a lot of human control/gesture, and the probability/chance of things happening introduced by the computer/arranging system,” Naucke explains. “It’s very conducive to taking a finite amount of sounds in an infinite amount of directions.”
Naucke has been working with sound since around age seven, taking drum lessons for years before jumping to punk bands in high school. In his late teens his interest turned toward jazz and noise. “I got a Moog for $200 when I was 18 or so, [and] had no clue how to use it,” he recalls. “That really foreshadowed the next decade-plus of my life, and I have been working with synthesizers and electronics ever since.” While figuring his way around synths, Naucke also studied visual art in college, developing a fascination with, as he puts it, “what places and times sound like.”
Throughout his voluminous discography, Naucke has proven adept at building sonic environments that feel like three-dimensional spaces. Operator Voices is a particularly strong example, but for him, making music with a visual sensibility is in his musical DNA. “With all my records I could really ‘see’ what the end resulted sounded like before it was done,” he says. “I’m really into making music that sounds like the way things look, or how places or times feel. That’s what provokes me the most.” Source
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发表于 2020-10-29 21:31:42
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