#insect fields

[the-out-door]

200 Words: INSECT FACTORY

(In 200 Words, we highlight a new record we like a lot, via a 200-word review by Marc Masters and 200 words (or so) from the artist about whatever they choose.)

INSECT FACTORY - Work LP (Insect Fields)

Rhythm seems to me to be an under-appreciated aspect of drone music. This is understandable, as drone often seems more focused on stillness and clock-erasure than motion or time-keeping. But the best drone music has multiple rhythms - real, imagined, and most importantly, a combination of the two. Jeff Barsky’s work as Insect Factory has often struck me as a perfect example of this. It always has a pulse, some undercurrent pushing it along. Sometimes the rhythm is right there on the surface, as if Barsky sees no reason to hide it, and he’s right.

Work could be the most rhythmic Insect Factory release so far. Every track has an undeniable cadence, whether created by discernible aural events like blips of distortion and bites of plucked guitar string, or forged from the subtle, sometimes even subconscious undulations of the music’s forward progress. The rhythm has levels, too: in some ways it’s the spine of the music, but in other ways it’s something to latch onto while the rest of Barsky’s tones, textures, and sonic postulations sweep over you. By the end of Work I may not necessarily know how much time I’ve spent listening, but I know I’ve been taken somewhere.

– Marc Masters

<a href="http://insectfactory.bandcamp.com/album/work">Work by INSECT FACTORY</a>

JEFF BARSKY on Work

I’m a huge fan of French filmmaker Jacques Tati. Tati’s films are almost entirely wordless and plotless, but utilize city sounds, incidental character dialogue, and squeaks and chirps from everyday objects for a soundtrack. Playtime, in particular, was inspiring to me over the last year. Playtime’s anonymous characters move almost entirely in straight lines through hallways of an airport and turning at sharp right angles at the beginning of the film, but in a slow transition over two hours to the last act, the film culminates in a restaurant getting completely destroyed on opening night, showing proudly that chaos reigns over the rigid geometry of the movements from earlier in the film. Philip Kemp from Rotten Tomatoes said, “If Playtime has a plot, it’s how the curve comes to reassert itself over the straight line.”

I thought a lot, in particular, about curves and straight lines when I was making recordings over the latter half of 2015 and early 2016 – the sessions that yielded my new Work LP. I thought a lot about how straight lines are becoming curves in our everyday lives. We used to go to work to spend all day thinking about producing and counting and quantifying and earning, and some of us would get a job review every 10 months. But this “straight line” of measurement and data is slowly bending to fit what we now do with our personal time – in the form of credit and capital received for sharing information online and retraining our brains to get excited for the response and acceptance from our community. Not to mention the theater that results. This interaction has become like work.

My guitar playing is largely atmospheric, and I’ve always thought a lot about structure and space when I’m making music. I also think a lot about filling rooms with sound, and repurposing these rooms as meditative social spaces. And this leads me to the straight line that pointed forward with the slightest upward trajectory of social progress and was overtaken by a “curve”.

Resisting this curve is also the work I’m talking about.

Work is out now on Insect Fields. Buy it here.