Erika Nesse does tremendous work with fractal processing of sound. For “Unbroken” she takes her own singing of the classic hymn “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and then proceeds to break the soft, slow rendition into numerous infinitesimal little pieces, countless splinters. Those are then rectified into a stream of unintelligible matter that nonetheless seems to retain much of the emotion, much of the sad-toned truth, of the original. Nesse then layers longer segments of her own voice, held vowels and looped syllables, atop the frayed, expertly random, blissfully raging current. She wills the classic to be broken, and then challenges it to reassemble itself. How much of that reassembly takes place in the music and how much takes place in the listener’s imagination is the question that lingers.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/conversationswithrocks. Based in Boston, Nesse explores the topic of fractal music at fractalmusicmachine.com. More from her at youtube.com and terraneanrecordings.bandcamp.com.