Taiwanese-Brooklyn transplant Calvin “Kai-Wei” Chang’s debut album Reprocessor is musical, dense and seemingly done-based, inflicting it to straddle plenty of genres from experimental to darkwave to IDM, however that’s not what units it aside. It’s the truth that it’s made totally from discovered sounds, recorded by Chang between 2020 and 2022; no further sounds or samples have been added. Intended to doc the adjustments in life throughout COVID, Chang took these sounds and painstakingly reworked, re-engineered and, after all, reprocessed them till they made the visceral, flowing assertion piece that’s this album. Chang sums it up finest himself:
Reprocessor is a sonic documentation and “musicalization” of Covid19 period discovered sounds, with songs composed between 2020-2022. In lieu of standard “reworking” of supply supplies, over two hours in size of uncooked recordings are repetitively bolstered, dissected and extracted for expressive sonic occasions.
When one actually stops to take into consideration the truth that the supply materials on Reprocessor is the one materials, it’s type of mindboggling, particularly from the angle of an EDM producer; that is how digital music was initially fashioned again within the Forties via the 60s and even up to the 80s. Before we had this huge library of sounds for drums, kicks, snares, pianos and strings to modify for synths, all of these issues had to be recoded, pitched, cleaned up, saved and handed on so there may even be synthesizers and programmers. We’re to this point modernized now that it’s all taken with no consideration and the sounds and area have change into so clear and correct that new sounds are created from samples of samples of samples. So what occurs when a producer applies all this new tech to the grassroots sound sound loop format? Kaiwei has the reply.
It doesn’t appear Kaiwei’s intention with Reprocessor was to go grassroots in any approach, however reasonably to see what it will sound like to make full compositions out of discovered recordings utilizing trendy gear. One may simply glean that even with trendy advantages, it’s a painstaking and tedious strategy of math, code, and reduce/copy/paste to get stated compositions lined up, layered and sounding something like music. The consequence, nonetheless, appears well worth the hassle.
With plenty of instrumental musicians additionally contributing sounds to the album, Reprocessor could be very a lot nonetheless within the experimental realm of issues, and listening to it, one can simply perceive how he’s earned a status for his compositions accompanying multimedia artwork instillations and avant garde performing arts items. That stated, it’s additionally very a lot tinged with drone, industrial and even deep home sounds. The musicality of many items, such because the title observe, “Breakbeat Funky 102” (in the event you assume there’s something resembling a traditional breakbeat on this observe, you’d be useless fallacious) and the “Tors” collection could be exhausting to discover on first hear, however preserve listening. Through the drone and chaos, nearly each a part of these tracks it an truly fairly delicate piece of symphony-like composition.
Other tracks, akin to “Identity” (the one observe with a discernable beat), “4u” and the endlessly ambient “Duet” sound extra trad musical however that’s solely as a result of they’re additionally fairly melodic and have recognizable music sounds. What Reprocessor asks of the listener is to take the album as an entire and join the dots so the music could be heard in any a part of the composition. “Chung Yeung,” a our YEDM premiere at the moment, is the primary observe on the album and appears to be a preview of this obvious dichotomy, straddling the heavy and the elegant and discovering music in each elements.
The opening observe of this document, “Chung Yeung” is in of itself a compilation of brief compositional and sonic concepts, that each one sprung from a collection of freely improvised, live-processed trombone and vocal performances. The multi-sectional kind foreshadows the overarching construction of the total document, in addition to a few of its key sonic components and themes.
Named after the well-known lunar calendar pageant (loosely translated at “Double Ninth Festival” because it takes place on the ninth day of the ninth month), a day of remembrance the place the Chinese and Taiwanese individuals climb mountains to their ancestors’ graves to clear, preserve and depart items, “Chung Yeung” units a somber tone for the album: that is each a remembrance of the struggles of COVID and maybe those that misplaced their lives, and a clearing out and “reprocessing” of these ghostly sounds and energies from a interval many people are nonetheless making an attempt to course of.
The realm of experimental music serves as a forefront instance of what could also be potential in industrial music and stated industrial musicians look to artists like Kaiwei to push that boundary for them. However within the case of Reprocessor, it appears Kaiwei can be saying it’s necessary to know ones roots and hone one’s compositional expertise as effectively. COVID confirmed humanity its personal limitations; we’re one photo voltaic flare away from dropping most if not all of our digital assets, however Kaiwei and others who know the way to create music from their very own loops would seemingly be main the cost in that case. In the meantime, capturing the vitality and feeling of such a tumultuous time can be necessary. If nothing else, Reprocessor reveals that creativity will at all times discover a approach, and that it’ll even make new methods for sound and expression with just some discovered loops, a heap of persistence and a necessity to be heard.
Reprocessor releases on Monday, October ninth and shall be accessible to stream on Spotify (the place a number of tracks are already accessible) and could be pre-ordered for buy on Kaiwei’s Bandcamp web page.
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