Flocking 19 by Shedding (Bandcamp Link)
“I’ve recently been interested in building layers of intentional chaos and exploring perceptions of order and the natural human tendency to seek and find patterns within that sound. There is a deliberate contrast between the controlled chaos simulating the natural world and the synthetic sounds I’m working with.“
Two longer pieces and 4 shorter pieces.
Names of the pieces use words in combination with three primary words, Flock, Flap, and Chirp.
Sounds seem primarily programmatically generated or manipulated. While it says below that these were recorded during a “sampler performance”, the sounds themselves seldom sound as if they were drawn from the natural world, except in the most abstract sense.
With the quote from their website which opens this writeup, it is hard to know how many of the event streams are simply set in motion and how many of them might be manipulated during their progress.
In general, what order which is expressed in the pieces is more like the order of nature sounds than the order of music. I.e., in general, there is no apparent tempo in most pieces relating the divergent sounds to the other sounds. When tempo does develop in events, as in track 4, “FLOCK1_MILCHI”, the tempos of the different event streams converge, but don’t affect the tempo of other event streams.
As if, in an algorithmic forest, we are listening to the sounds of algorithmic wind ticking through algorithmic branches as algorithmic creatures frolicking in that artificial world, all to the tempo or progress along the events of their algorithmic day.
On the other hand, while synthetic, it is not particularly harsh or dissonant, and somehow a pleasant feeling of lightness or almost whimsy is present in most pieces.
As an exercise, I recommend you listen to “Chirps” by Steve Lacy and Evan Parker, before, during, or after listening to Flocking 19 by Shedding.
“Assembled from July 2019 sampler performances in Milwaukee (Jazz Gallery) and Chicago (Elastic Arts)”
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