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CD
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WEA 64321CD
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New collaborative album from Haswell (Mego, Warp) and Hecker (Mego, Editions Mego), featuring Electroacoustic UPIC recordings. And yes, in one of the stranger major label alliances of the past few decades, it's issued on WEA Classics in the UK!! "Following a period of study at the Xenakis Institute of Research on Music and Acoustics in Paris, Russell Haswell and Florian Hecker have produced an album using Xenakis' UPIC system -- a computer program which interprets lines and shapes into music. The duo worked with the unique electroacoustic UPIC system which implements a graphic approach to sound synthesis; one literally draws the sound. Haswell and Hecker recognized the UPIC as an instrument of metamorphosis, turning imagery into sound. First, they fed the UPIC with images of our time; erotica, food pornography (images of French desserts), a geodesic dome, a double helix, a microscopic portrait of the blackest ever black, the Madrid train bombing and a mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb. Next, they furnished the UPC with their own drawings: dense patterns of hundreds of arcs in the manner of Sol LeWitt's conceptual drawings. Pushing further: 'We applied the Surrealist technique of real-time automatic drawing,' -- Hecker. Distilled out of nine hours of original material, Blackest Ever Black is, in Haswell's description: 'a large four panel polyptych, consisting of slices of a succession of images that could assist the experience of synaesthesia.' The artist Haswell and Hecker derived the title Blackest Ever Black from a scientific paper on the 'blackest black ever made on Earth,' an ultrablack coating that can be painted onto optical instruments to absorb essentially all the light that hits them." This is a DDDD recording (the additional "D" based on the fact that that the instrument the music was made on was also digital and the recording was digitally recorded, mixed and mastered).
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