HASWELL & HECKER

UPIC Diffusion Session #23

LP (Black Vinyl)

Boomkat Product Review:

Russell Haswell & Florian Hecker throw mucky and transgressive imagery into Xenakis’ visual-to-sound generating UPIC system for a tortuous mind bender on Editions Mego.

Using the same UPIC system that prompted their ‘Blackest Ever Black’ slab for Warner Classics & Jazz in 2007 (and lent its name to the label a few years later), the leading noise wranglers Haswell & Hecker continue deploying Xenakis’ ‘70s invention to wickedly unpredictable ends here.

The 33 minute diffusion is a two-channel edit produced initially for UPIC DIFFUSION SESSION #23, and then performed as a live diffusion across 8-channels. It marked the 100th anniversary of the late, great Greek composer’s birth, and uses the system as sole sound output. Initially imagined as a utopian tool for music making in a lineage of user-friendly electronic kit that includes Daphne Oram’s Oramics set-up, which also turned visual input to sound, the duo are notoriously known for feeding the UPIC system with less than salubrious images - said to include news photographs of disasters and atrocities, "food porn" through to depictions of the natural world and microscopic images of molecular structures - to generate a right head fuck.

“Throughout UPIC DIFFUSION SESSION #23 frequency clusters move and morph in the most unusual manner, shifting and stretching into shapes that hint at some kind of magical process. What starts out deceptively simple soon unravels into a large array of sonic mayhem. Symbolic jet planes are shredded by a swarm of insects, a metal bowl howls into the void, a tiny tin toy crawls into a thicket with the resolute aura of a black hole. A burning geyser of laser forms liquid shrapnel. This is sound as an alchemical process, a constant chimerical flow into the netherworld and is the net result of the decades long radical investigations by the two artists involved. UPIC DIFFUSION SESSION #23 is a direct, rich and rewarding listen for those willing to invest time into the outer limits.”

LP (Black Vinyl) (0)

Edition of 300 copies, includes banderole and download.

Please note that shipping dates for pre-orders are estimated and are subject to change

Boomkat Product Review:

Russell Haswell & Florian Hecker throw mucky and transgressive imagery into Xenakis’ visual-to-sound generating UPIC system for a tortuous mind bender on Editions Mego.