The Art of BLEEP!
Again, two luminaries from the MSquared stable produce what could be the album of the year. An electric storm of tones and mood, colliding, caressing, coalescing into sparkling rivulets of sound. Drink it up!
Favorite track: Timeless Retro.
Whiskerfloater [ful]Filaments recording process - Shane Fahey
As Dru Jones was the instigator for the first Whiskerfloater album, it was my turn to initiate the second Whiskerfloater project. I elected to go with an iOS app I was currently playing with in 2019. I’d been travelling a lot in 2018 and had just moved from Ampify’s Launchpad app to their Groovebox app + was enjoying programming tracks on the iPhone rather than the iPad.
I let Dru know that she could get direct access to the Groovebox stems (audio & MIDI) via Abelton, which she uses. She wasn’t overly enthusiastic about me sending her Euro style dance tracks. I agreed with her take on that scenario and said it wasn’t so much the musical statement or style of the overall track that she could take from, rather the audio components, phrases and patterns that could be isolated, manipulated & temp-adjusted. The wavetable synths in Groovebox are cool I think and the MIDI data can be used to play entirely different sound sources, synths and samples in Abelton.
Anyway I didn’t hear much more about the files I sent to her ,,, a few months later a very generous batch of fresh new tracks dropped. I was pretty astonished by the pieces Dru sent, they were mysterious, languid and yet pulsating and beautifully structured. All I could perceive from the original audio files were some snippets of melody, a beat or two or a riff slowed down and reshaped texturally.
On the first side Dru’s pieces have been left in tact apart from the second track which has some synth overdubs (the only instance of an analogue synth across the whole album). These pieces, which also include the opener and closer are mesmerising, furtive akin to gentle streams of light reflecting water. My percussive ambient piece is taken from an iOS Launchpad jam after a gig and the sparse chordal piece was played on a Modal Skulpt virtual analog synth.
The tone for side two was set by the indecipherable Namelessly Chopped2, a sampler’s mental microbe infestation.The rhythmic jitter of Shabby Shack was in direct response to the opening track. Interpersals and loops of Dru’s original piece create the sections for the track’s arrangement. Timeless Retro is a deconstructed version of one of my Groovebox pieces at its original tempo and beat form with urbanscape synth FX. Spectro-bifurr is essentially a remix of one of Dru’s original pieces devolving into gross motor utterance amidst celestial melody. Sparkie’s Plug is a reconstituted sampling of Dru’s R’n’B chords & jagged beats with some bass and lead synth overdubs.
credits
released January 1, 2024
Whisker Floater released their first album NoZinc in 2019 on U.S. label Æscape Sounds. [ful]Filaments, their second project, was largely completed by the end of 2021 but has been remixed for this release.
These works are the product of remote collaboration between Shane Fahey (Scattered Order, The Makers of the Dead Travel Fast) and Dru Jones (Skipism, Lint). Using an unreservedly digital composing tool as the starting point, these tracks sprawled and looped their way to adulthood by circuitous routes. They have been deconstructed many times. Whiskerfloater’s process leans toward the possibility that there is no true end point, just stops along the way.
Recorded 2020-2
Mixed and mastered by Shane Fahey 2023
Cover by Dru Jones
Featuring grand organ, Moog, Buchla, and live percussion, Ehsan Gelsi's opus explores the possibilities of analogue electronics. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 25, 2021