Justin Buckley’s “Pong”and “0101”provide another pair of examples of how one musician’s experiments are a listener’s benefit. Both tracks are early tryouts by Buckley of, among other tools, the Cylonix Cyclebox, a “digital oscillator.”But the real experiment isn’t with technology so much as with aesthetic approach. Buckley is working toward something he calls “rhythmic dissonance,”which has an effect along the lines of the phase shifting we associate with Steve Reich’s work. Buckley defines this as follows: “can sounds which aren’t necessarily in sync actually work together in a composition.”
Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/justin-buckley. More from Buckley, who is based in Berlin, Germany, at crumblereshape.com and twitter.com/crumblereshape.
These are terrific. When one works with a modular synth and doesn’t necessarily bother with a hard clock, one possibly ends up with a lot of interesting rhythmic audio tracks that don’t obviously fit together. Of course, they do fit together, as Justin proves. Rhythm doesn’t have to fall on the one, and you don’t have to dance to it.
Really enjoyed the tracks. I am researching the concept of groove and how music makes you dance, paradoxically it seems to me that rhythmic dissonance is a part of the process.