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Relentless (Radio Edit) · Adana Twins
Flower of Cane
℗ 2017 Watergate Records
Released on: 2017-06-19
Music Publisher: Ed. Jackmode / BMG Rights Management / Copyright Control
Composer: Jan Friso Traas, Benjamin Busse
Lyricist: Jeppe Kjellberg, Gisli Gislason
«This project began with a chat to a scientist at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, Mikhail Spivakov. His work is related to my old area of research, and he had the idea that maybe I could use some of their data to create a piece of music. So I travelled up to Cambridge to meet him and the rest of his lab group, and their collaborators, to talk about what they are doing there, and think about how it could translate to a music/visual project. We decided to focus on their research on chromosomal conformation capture, which experimentally detects points of contact between chromosomes (long strings of DNA), and then employs computational models of folding, to predict how the chromosomes are packaged up in a complex tangled bundle of strings. This process of simulated folding to create our best guess of real chromosome structure is a beautiful process, so this beauty became the focus of the project.
Luckily for us, Andy Lomas was interested in getting involved, and being the genius he is, he built an interface from scratch for mapping the raw data into the Unreal gaming engine, which could be used for creating video sequences, as well as a VR experience. Once we had the ideas and video aesthetic is was just a matter of me figuring out how to make the music fit. The raw data wouldnt map well explicitly to music, given music is of a very particular form, and raw data not suited to this form just yields indiscernible noise. So I set about two techniques for musical representation of the video and ideas, one based on live instrumentation, the other based on generative computational approaches.
Chromos is the first of these two pieces, using live instrumentation, and accompanied with the simplest visual form of the project showing a single chromosomal aggregation process. We wanted to show the data is this unadulterated form, so you can see the real science in action, and the real chromosome structure, along with glowing red appearing to show where genes are most highly activated. Its a glimpse into the complexity and form of one of the most important molecular structures in all of life. So musically I wanted to try and capture some of this grandeur, along with the complex messiness involved, which still yields a coherent, functional outcome (the living being it codes for and creates!). To try and achieve this I turned to one of my favourite instruments, the sansula, and I played lots of tempo-free melodies, which I layered, to mimic the complexity, and then used to define the underlying chord sequence as the coherent centre and function. I decided to keep it free of percussion and other elements, to focus on the beauty and peace of the visual process. I just added a classic wash of real Roland RE201 spring reverb and some work on the widening and pyscho-acoustic space with some simulated binaural effects.
The second piece in this project is Coils of Living Synthesis»
MAX COOPER
Thanks for having a look at the first video from my next audio-visual album coming later this year. The whole project was a commission from the Barbican centre in London, where they do a lot of great events, Ive seen many of my favourite gigs there. So I wanted to prepare something special, and something intense, using the structure of the beautiful hall there as a canvas for the show. Their brief was around emerging new technologies and how theyre changing society, so I tried to boil the whole process down to its fundamentals which I could visualise and write music for — which spawned «yearning for the infinite». The idea being that were locked in our societal- and nature-driven pursuit of growth and knowledge and more, always more. I had come across some really beautiful ideas for visualising the infinite which Ill tell you more about later as the content comes, and I decided to combine these abstract visualisations with stories of us, in our endless activity as part of the systems in which we exist. This also gave me the potential for the scale and intensity I wanted to create for the project. This particular chapter comes later on in the show when both the human story and the abstractions (transcendental digits from Martin Krzywinski, aperiodic tiling from Jessica In and dividing surfaces from Andy Lomas) start to merge. The great visual artist and long term collaborator Nick Cobby had time in Mexico city which seemed an amazing opportunity to capture this dense human activity, and once again hes created another of his tightly synced and detailed masterpieces, many thanks Nick! I recommend watching on a big screen where possible. Lots more to come soon, thanks for watching and listening.
NICK COBBY
Maxs idea for Perpetual Motion was to document the continuous movement of people, exploring how there is no inherent meaning in life, only our own meaning which we create through striving towards our goals. When we discussed the idea of the film, Max and I felt Mexico City was the perfect place to use as a canvas. A sprawling metropolis of 9 million people, all packed in tight and some really interesting land forms and architecture. I then got the idea of using drones when scouting for locations on Google Earth. There were some amazing geometric forms that when viewed from above give an entirely different perspective of the city. I was really interested in the juxtaposition of these orderly forms with the irregular, disorderly chaos confined within it. For me it really helped push the idea of living as part of a perpetual system. I collaborated with 3 very talented Mexican photographers who shot some incredible footage for me, Manuel Marañón, Roberto H and Santiago Arau. It was a pleasure to collaborate with them and I hope the film can be shown in Mexico some time soon. For the animation side, I collaborated with Andy Lomas and Jessica In, integrating their forms frame by frame into the drone footage with my own point data, aiming to create unexpected transitions and connections between reality, hyper realism and the hidden systems beneath.