Unabridged digital only edition.
Originally released September 25, 2021 available as limited physical edition [CDr 38 copies] & name your price abridged digital on Psøma Psi Phi =>
pspsph.bandcamp.com/album/fm40p-mkii
Following on the mind-melting FM40P, David Burraston returns to Psoma Psi Phi with FM40P mkII, another unique session exploring four-operator FM synthesis by way of Burraston's own curious methodologies.
Two extended runtime tracks make up a full hour of immersive listening, with "honka_#1a" feeling like a completely synthetic free jazz session, or perhaps a computer brain thinking about what "jazz" might sound like based solely upon a series of text-based inputs. There's still an oddly human sense in the note fingerings and sections where some notes extensively sustain and others blip once before disappearing into the fray, an implication of fluidity without latency or hesitation giving way to clusters of ideas overlapping with each other in a stack of musical Venn diagrams.
The twice as long "DRN1" piece presents the four-operator designs in a completely different light, simultaneously more angular and also more inert, with metallic, pipe-like overtones struggling to return to the surface and almost always being pulled away from their resolutions and displaced into some other shape beneath folded sawtoothy waves. Across the forty-minute piece, more and more stasis occurs, a paralysis of more and more held notes, gradually accumulating in a whorl of wavering shimmer.
Another intrepid and stimulating sensory experience being added to an already large catalog of rich sonic material, FM40P mkII continues to illustrate with inimitable immediacy and masterful restraint just how deep the well goes within the machines whose time has come and gone in the eyes and ears of the general public. Burraston may want us to consider the very real possibility that new tools are not quite as necessary as they seem, or further, that they should first be used to maintain and redefine the tools and systems of the past.
W/P by David Burraston. Generated on 1st August 2021 at Noyzelab using Yamaha FB-01 and MANIAC cellular automata sequencer [custom sysex code for fractional note tuning/timings]. Text and design by ABM&D. Noyzelab and the Noyzelab logo appear courtesy of Noyzelab. (C) + (P) Noyzelab & Psoma Psi Phi 2021 / All lights observed. This is Psoma Psi Phi number NYZ-XV.
released September 25, 2021