CD + book – Fancyyyyy

With a packaging whose design is due to Joe Gilmore and Florian Hecker’s refined font manipulation, printed in two distinct colors, metallic silver and black, with a thirty-page booklet written by Curtis Roads, himself a historic electronic composer and one of the leading pulsar synthesis experts, The New Pulsar Generator Recordings Volume 1 is a somewhat bristly and experimental sound project. It is presented by Marcin Pietruszewski under Fancyyyyy, a label operating in both Glasgow and Manchester and dedicated to unconventional audio research with many theoretical-practical implications (for example the creation and sale of Eurorack modules of non-linear feedback effects makers and clock dividers). The work was composed using a new implementation of the classic computer music software Pulsar Generator. This version was developed by Pietruszewski himself, developing an advanced form of granular synthesis that is used to generate somewhat unpredictable and chaotic sonic sequences. Its output varies from singular pulses and sequences to continuous tones on multiple perceptual time scales, an idea that was first proposed by Iannis Xenakis and later developed by Curtis Roads. The effect on listening is abstract and celestial, otherworldly and abrasive compositions, with sudden passages and changes of register. Fifteen tracks are featured, most of them very short, under two minutes. The most extensive, “tnpgr (shifting (glissement) (f -_ _f_))”, at just over five minutes, was developed along with some of the other compositions at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in 2018. The synthesis of the pulsar is purely digital, an algorithmic composition implemented by Pietruszewski in the open source programming language SuperCollider 3. Between puffs, hisses, pops, eruptions and various gurgles, resorting to abstruse rhythmic manipulations, triggering sudden passages and mutations, Marcin Pietruszewski never fails to connect multiple elements and experimental sound combinations, giving the extreme diversity of impulses a certain coherence and rigor. An imaginary poetic tale, an imaginative journey, however, peeks out between the grooves and certain timbres and sound transformations seem entirely new, poised between fuzzy psychoacoustics and mercurial avant-jazz.

 

Marcin Pietruszewski – The New Pulsar Generator Recordings Volume 1