What makes a piece of music in question complex? The misdirection here, in this track from Guy Birkin and Sun Hammer, begins early, just 10 seconds into the recording, when, after a semblance of a theme emerges, it cuts out and begins again.
And the explicit complexity isn’t all about the audio zigging when your ears expect a zag. There are bright sprays of noise and jittery manifestations of latter day glitch. It’s a compendium of complications, all in service of thinking that Birkin and Sun Hammer have put into, in recent years, the whole concept of complexity. That is, what makes a piece of music complex? What earns it that adjective? The track is off their forthcoming album *Complexification*, on the estimable Entr’acte label. It’s actually two samples of the record, combined into one file. The recipe for their exploration of complexity is as follows:
>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.
>
>In this project, complexity is understood in
terms of the quantity and variety of musical
elements or patterns. The result is two
parallel threads of music, each representing
a progression of increasing complexity.
The above visual accompanies Birkin’s announcement post on his [blog](https://aestheticcomplexity.wordpress.com/), in which he writes, “The aim of this project is to explore musical complexity through a creative approach rather than an analytical one.” The image appears to show an increasingly complex sequence of related visuals, suggesting a means of comparison. There’s also a more lengthy [PDF](http://www.entracte.co.uk/E187.pdf) summarizing their approach to the subject. More on the record at [entracte.co.uk](http://entracte.co.uk/projects/guy-birkin–sun-hammer-e187/).
Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/entracte](https://soundcloud.com/entracte/e187). More from Birkin at [aestheticcomplexity.wordpress.com](https://aestheticcomplexity.wordpress.com/), [twitter.com/guybirkin](https://twitter.com/guybirkin), and [soundcloud.com/notl](https://soundcloud.com/notl). More from Sun Hammer, aka Jay Bodley of Portland, Oregon, at [sunhammer.com](http://sunhammer.com/), [twitter.com/sunhammer](https://twitter.com/sunhammer/) and [soundcloud.com/sunhammer](https://soundcloud.com/sunhammer).