My collaborative project with Guy Birkin, Complexification, has been released on Entr’acte. We are honored to be a part of this highly regarded label known for its excellent curation of experimental music. This album, which was started in spring of 2012 and finished in summer 2014, is composed around the idea of perception of complexity in music. Following is a brief description of our process.
The Complexification project explores musical complexity through a collaborative process based on a set of rules:
1. Make a short, simple piece of music. 2. Swap copies of the pieces with the other person. 3. Modify the given piece to make it more complex (the given piece must be used, but it can be trans- formed in any way, and new sounds may be added). 4. IF the result is more complex (as agreed by both participants), GOTO 2, otherwise HALT.
Says Guy in a blog about the album: “We developed the practice of using rules and constraints through participation in the Disquiet Junto. Some of the audio processing techniques were developed in Junto projects, and the group’s tradition of documenting the creative process led us to do the same in this project. The technical details about the process are available in a PDF via Entr’acte, which also includes spectrogram images of the tracks and a couple of analytical charts.”
