ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER w/ THE SIGHT BELOW & DAWN OF MIDI AT THE CROCODILE

Tuesday, February 4th at The Crocodile

Decibel proudly presents…

ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER – live A/V
Warp Records – Brooklyn
PITCHFORK REVIEW

w/ very special guests 

THE SIGHT BELOW – live A/V
Ghostly International

DAWN OF MIDI – live A/V
Thirsty Ear

opening set DJ by

NORDIC SOUL
Decibel

Adv. tickets $15 on sale Friday November 15th

Doors at 8PM / 21+

The  Crocodile
2200 2nd Ave. Seattle

ABOUT ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER
Although composer Daniel Lopatin’s R Plus Seven contains many familiar sonic touchstones for listeners who have followed the acclaimed electronic music composer’s development over the last half-decade, his Warp Records debut is a major departure from his previous work; Lopatin’s experimental inclinations lurk behind the scenes – in the concepts and procedures he adopted to create the tracks – while the music itself comes as close as Lopatin has ever gotten to anything resembling traditional song structure. Which, for Lopatin, is only so close: The work is full of overlapping, abstract musical through-lines, puzzle-like pieces that, taken together, might allow you to glimpse an overarching tableau. But it’s more about the journey than the destination. R Plus Seven is disruptive and hypnotic in equal measure, and the fun of it lies in trusting Lopatin as he guides you past – and often through – its succession of walls and mirrors.

The Brooklyn-based artist has always deftly balanced the experimental with the accessible: He has released several albums under his Oneohtrix Point Never moniker on various independent labels – including the 2013 3-CD/5 LP Rifts, a compilation of his early work – as well as amassing a large catalogue of mini-album tape releases. His most recent disc, 2011’s Replica, was built around samples of television commercials; Sasha Frere Jones of the New Yorker called it “music that gently triggers a series of images and feelings, none of which you can name and all of which seem entirely common.” He has built live soundscapes at the Museum of Modern Art; collaborated with Montreal-based ambient electronic music composer Tim Hecker on the largely improvised 2012 Instrumental Tourist; and recast the title track from his 2010 disc Returnal as an elegant and emotive piece for piano, featuring the otherworldly voice of Antony Hegarty. Advertising powerhouse Saatchi & Saatchi tapped Lopatin for an installation event at the 2012 Cannes film fest and Sofia Coppola’s longtime cohort Brian Reitzell invited him to create original music for Coppola’s The Bling Ring. Said the Saatchi execs, “There’s this grandeur to his music, but it’s always counterbalanced by moments of irony and lightness.”

“There’s a lot of allegory on this record,” Lopatin explains. “Sometimes they are meant to be oblique hints at layout and scale—like the distance between objects, or a partition between ideas. Sometimes they just ask you to consider the materiality of musical style, through abstraction.”

The cover art is a literal and figurative entryway into R Plus Seven, an image adapted by Lopatin’s longtime visual collaborator Robert Beatty from a mesmerizing 1982 animated short by Swiss filmmaker-graphic designer Georges Schwizgebel, Le Ravissement de Frank N. Stein, in which score drives the mysterious visuals, a constantly changing succession of rooms.

On a more conceptual level, Lopatin was inspired by avant garde novelist Georges Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi (Life A Users Manual), highly regarded for its intricate, almost game-like structure. The idea that a 600-page novel could depict a split-second moment in the life of a Parisian apartment block became a creative jumping off point for the record. Perec was also known for his commitment to Oulipo (a French acronym for “workshop of potential literature”), whose adherents used constraints – arcane rules or strategies – on their writing as a creative technique. Procedural poetry found its way into RP7 by way of Lopatin’s narrators, synthesized text-to-speech voices that Lopatin programmed to read back scrambled text he’d gathered from online Interactive fiction databases and catalogs. Manuscripts, walkthroughs, menu lists, instructions, legal disclaimers—all were subjected to Oulipo techniques, narrated by synthetic voices and then spread chromatically as sample instruments. It’s a technique prefigured in his work last year with visual artist Doug Aitken. Lopatin devised a haunting arrangement of the pop standard “I Only Have Eyes For You,” the words cut up and rearranged granularly, as a soundtrack for Aitken’s mammoth projected installation on the walls of Washington D.C.’s Hirschorn Museum. On RP7, he even includes a kind of lyric sheet – a form of text art, really – for the physical album sleeve. But the purpose of the narrators’ presence, despite the laborious effort it took to edit all the raw sounds Lopatin had collected, is a simple one: “When they speak on the record, it’s to signal certain musical pivots, questions or motifs that emerged from the text. Deciding how to fit the text stuff to the musical themes I was working on was purely intuitive. In that sense, the ‘procedural’ aspects of the record are actually not that important. They just perform a generative function, in that they give me suggestions on what my next step, musically speaking, should be.”

Absent from this disc is the sound of the vintage Roland Juno 60 analog synthesizer that the young Lopatin had first experimented with in the basement of his family’s home in the suburban Boston area. Lopatin is the son of Russian immigrants, both with musical backgrounds. The keyboard belonged to his father, formerly an engineer in the Soviet Union, and it figured prominently on previous albums. Here Lopatin, working in his Brooklyn apartment, relied for the most part on software synthesizers to build his tracks; then, with engineer Paul Corley, he mixed it down on an analog desk at composer-producer Valgeir Sigurðsson’s Bedroom Community studio in Iceland. A significant part of the digital gear that he used to striking effect comes from “software instrumental suites intended for commercials, television and films as score or underscore. I wanted to employ ersatz instrumentation to convey a sort of subliminal Hollywood sound.” The album opens with portentous, cathedral-sized organ riffs that wouldn’t be out of place in The Omen, giving way, as the album progresses, to seemingly more uplifting, almost heavenly choirs, gleaned from preloaded sounds that were often labeled as “spiritual.” RP7 takes you through a labyrinth of twisted idioms, where genre and emotionality engage and grapple with each another in the dark.

“By the time we got to Iceland,” Lopatin recalls, “the record had this larger than life digital presence to it. I tried to complicate those ersatz ensembles with room color, so that the end product was ambivalent in a way; no longer in a vacuum, but by no means natural.”

With all of its aural hallways and corridors, Oneohtrix Point Never’s R Plus Seven is a kind of choose-your-own adventure, reflecting the complexly structured yet utterly freewheeling process behind its creation. Concludes Lopatin, “I aimed to make a record that had this sort of digital plasticity to it. There is a conversation in the world right now about super-computing power becoming mainstream, rendering anyone a producer. That is aimed directly at my generation and onwards. No one in their right mind would make this record other than myself, but I did so using a palette that is readily available. I’m concerned about these new notions of technological freedom because, although there is no pedagogy saying, ‘this is how you make a record’ anymore, there is a highly regimented and socialized cultural marketplace that reinforces style, which is utterly inspiring to me. It’s the control I need to introduce my variations. It’s the process of saying ‘thanks, but no thanks.’”

ABOUT THE SIGHT BELOW
The Sight Below is an alias of Rafael Anton Irisarri, an American composer, multi-instrumentalist, curator, producer and interdisciplinary artist based out of the Pacific Northwest.

The music of The Sight Below conjures half-remembered dreams and soft-focus sentiments with elegiac beauty; like blurred snippets of film recognizable only as organic objects: black-and-white amoebas milling about, or a sunset rendered in grayscale. The resulting textured Gaussian curves are pinned to deep, propulsive bass tones and achingly subtle electronics. These guide the listener across the gloom and towards the music’s hopeful center. The results seem as effortless as natural phenomena; in fact, they’re carefully played, head-nodding hymns to the artist’s secluded life.

Glider (and its accompanying No Place for Us EP), released on Ghostly International in Autumn 2008, introduced a dark ambient techno aesthetic equally inspired by shoegaze, David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” and Wolfgang Voigt’s minimalistic rhythms. The album combined layer upon layer of processed guitars and electronics with muffled percussion and bass pulses, all improvised and recorded live. These works were described by All Music Guide as “impeccably made ambient thump-and-drone”, while Pitchfork Media praised them as “a beautifully bleak cloud of sound.”

Murmur followed in 2009 and included remixes by Arctic techno pioneer Biosphere, Eluvium, and Simon Scott (ex-member of British icons Slowdive). It steered Irisarri’s direction towards a Basic Channel/Chain Reaction territory – a self-admitted early influence on the artist’s sound. FACT magazine gave the EP a 4/5 rating and it was featured as “Single of The Week” on Boomkat, calling it an “excellent use of its feathered ambient core, lightening up an uptempo dub-techno template with plumes of abstract, floating textures.”

The following year The Sight Below released another eclectic, yet well-received album, 2010’s It All Falls Apart. Featuring vocals by fellow Seattle resident Tiny Vipers (Sub Pop) and additional production work by Simon Scott, XLR8R magazine gave it a 9/10 ranking and called it “an astounding range of visceral sonic possibilities, like

a hurricane passing over an ocean, gathering heat and force while simultaneously cooling the waters below.”

In 2011, The Sight Below released N-Plants remixes (for UK’s legendary Touch label), a 12” record on its own right and an extension of Biosphere’s critically-acclaimed N-Plants album – a work that explored the beauty and vulnerability of Japanese nuclear power
facilities. In all, Irisarri has a string of remixes under his belt, commissioned by German minimal techno master Pantha Du Prince (Rough Trade), School of Seven Bells (Ghostly), cv313 (Echospace), The Naked And The Famous (Somewhat Damaged/Fiction), Fax (SEM), Stewart Walker (Persona), ISAN (Morr Music), and Glitterbug (False Industries), amongst many others.

Irisarri continues to travel frequently to perform live throughout the world. His live improvised sets have earned him praise from the music press and influential figures like Chain Reaction’s own Robert Henke and ex-Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flr. In this live context, he has collaborated twice with Austrian guitarist extraordinaire Fennesz, and toured extensively in North America with Pantha Du Prince and labelmate Lusine. Past highlights include concerts at Barcelona’s Sonar Festival (2009), Detroit’s Movement: DEMF (2009), Montreal’s MUTEK (2009), Berlin’s Berghain (2009). Krakow’s Unsound (2008), Rotterdam’s DEAF (2012), Nantes’ S.O.Y. (2008), London’s OpenFrame (2010) and Sevilla’s CICUS (2012). Aside from electronic music festivals, Irisarri has presented his works at multidisciplinary arts events, including Milan’s prestigious MITO SettembreMusica festival (2009) and Israel Festival (2010) in Jerusalem.

Back home in Seattle, Irisarri curates and produces advanced sound and interdisciplinary art events, thus helping create a hub for contemporary art proposals in the city. In 2011, he started the Substrata Festival, a three-day intimate event focusing on varying perspectives of scale though the use of sound, composition and visuals – an international showcase featuring accomplished artists working in the cutting edge where structural abstraction meets physical dynamics.

“Irisarri embodies the hybrid genre…the new kind of composer, who exists in an undifferentiated welter of pop, techno, and classical.” -Pitchfork (USA)
ABOUT DAWN OF MIDI
Listenable and insane. That’s the sound Dawn of Midi spent years shaping, culminating in their most mesmerizing work yet: “Dysnomia.”

In many ways, it’s the first record that truly reflects the trio’s critically acclaimed live show, a test of endurance and trust that involves bassist Aakaash Israni, pianist Amino Belyamani and percussionist Qasim Naqvi performing their compositions note-for-note without ever appearing the least bit predictable. If anything, Dawn of Midi’s sets are as red-blooded and rhythmic as a seamlessly mixed DJ set, casting spells on crowds in the same way the group’s favorite experimental and electronic acts have for decades.

Which explains why The New Yorker’s music critic, Sasha Frere-Jones, wrote “an hour flew by in what seems like minutes” after witnessing their high-wire act last year, and Radiolab host Jad Abumrad added “[I’ve] seriously never seen anything like these guys.”

Belyamani is quick to say that Dawn of Midi have followed their own internal logic since day one, largely thanks to the fact that they were friends first — playing late-night tennis matches in dimly lit parking lots well before they stepped into a studio or rehearsal space. As such, Belyamani admits its taken quite some time to shift from early improv sessions to the well-oiled machine that makes “Dysnomia” both a dizzying dance record and a deeply immersive living room listen.

“Playing a locked groove like we do on this record involves a lot of discipline and hard work,” he explains. “You don’t start out that way unless you’re a group of folk musicians from the same village.”

Forget being from the same village; Dawn of Midi’s respective families aren’t even from the same country. Belyamani was born in Morocco, where he “grew up in a culture where people do polyrhythms in their sleep.” A stateside move didn’t happen until he turned 18 and decided to study abroad at CalArts. Meanwhile, Israni relocated from India to Southern California when he was just four months old, and Naqvi’s parents left Pakistan before he was born in Connecticut.

“Both my parents are major music fans,” says Naqvi. “They love old Hindi songs from the black and white film era, and different kinds of traditional music from the South Asian subcontinent. So that stuff has definitely filtered through me somehow, but scales and rhythms from that part of the world are not something that are central to my musical thinking. At least not yet.”

That’s the thing about Dawn of Midi now that they’re based in Brooklyn and touring open-minded markets worldwide: As carefully cultivated as their aesthetic is, it’s also been known to incorporate, willfully and otherwise, such wildly divergent influences and interests as Aphex Twin, the Police, Can and Ms. Pac-Man. And when they really fall for a record — like they did with Dr. K. Gyasi after hearing his highlife hooks in Berlin — it quickly raises the bar of what they want from their own music.

Hence how “Dysnomia” ended up being recorded, mixed and mastered in its entirety twice. As Israni explains, “Late one night, I realized the record we had just made wasn’t the quantum leap we needed, so we started over. Then it was another year and a half of rehearsing and composing before we could go in the studio again.”

It shows. While the original version was semi-improvised like the trio’s critically acclaimed debut (2010’s “First”), the final 46-minute cut is a brooding balancing act between a fascination with structure and a desire to create their own definition of dance music. Set aside an hour to experience the multi-movement title track in full and you’ll hear what we mean, as a language only Dawn of Midi truly understands locks into one long, seemingly endless groove and mixer Rusty Santos (Animal Collective, Owen Pallett, DJ Rashad) makes sure every last high-wire hook hits you square in the chest, even the quiet parts.

“It’s interesting with this piece,” says Naqvi. “There’s actual music in the silences. You could almost take the negative space and make something completely different with it.”

“The spaces between the dialogues of the notes are filled in by the body of the listener,” adds Israni, “and they complete the circuit, leaving one option — to dance.”

ABOUT NORDIC SOUL
Sean Horton aka Nordic Soul has long been enamored with artistic expression, the creation of music, and the technology that fuses it all together, much to the benefit and evolution of the world of electronic music and the underground culture that surrounds it. His healthy obsession began at the age of 11 with the gift of his first guitar. After attending a Plus 8 party in his hometown Detroit, Sean embraced underground electronic music. Today he is best known as founder, curator and president of the Decibel Festival in Seattle.

Beyond his work with Decibel, Sean is an expert deejay, producer and performer who has been turning out dance floors since the late 90s. His emotionally charged sets are infused with live instrumentation and ripe with the mélange of organic and synthesized tones, all riding on top of heavy bass lines. A lover of many musical styles, Nordic Soul’s interest and roots in techno, house, hip hop, jazz, soul, industrial and dub contribute to his diverse musical palette.

Since Nordic Soul’s inception in 2002, he has shared the stage with an eclectic cross section of international talent, including Bassnectar, Moby, Major Lazer, Grimes, Boys Noize, Simian Mobile Disco, Modeselektor, Trentemoller, Four Tet, Moodymann, Green Velvet, Moderat, Gui Boratto, Monolake, Kevin Saunderson, Mount Kimbie, Matthew Dear, Theo Parrish and Motor City Drum Ensemble. Sean has also performed at several major festivals world-wide, including Dimensions (Croatia), MUTEK (Montreal), Communikey (Boulder) and Decibel (Seattle).

Nordic Soul has released music on a wide variety of labels including K Records, Buttermilk Records, Peloton and Basic_Sounds.