This album is the second of a series of installments inspired by the book The Stack by Benjamin H. Bratton.


By the time I was conceiving the whole “Layers” project, I was deeply into techno music, at the point that I decided that one of the EPs had to be composed exclusively of straightforward techno tracks. Orthodox as it should have been, I needed a hardware drum machine for the job. So, a few months later I ended up buying one, the AnalogRytm produced by Elektron, a brand whose instruments are known, amongst other things, for their powerful, yet notoriously convoluted, interfaces. And that was it: the exposure to the abstruse instrument naturally led me to position the new techno-inspired EP at the Interface layer within The Stack concept.


That also prompted a progressive detachment from my personal comfort-zone perspective of electronic musician, seasoned software engineer and early computer enthusiast, at ease with any specimen of unfriendly GUI and non-standard HCI pattern, toward the embracement of a reversed mindset, where interfacial GRIDS appear as collections of arcane symbols of quasi-religious nature, whose function could be summoned only through ritualistic repetition of occult patterns, with the vanishing of any direct cause-effect relationship.


The actual and imagined perception of oscillatory degrees of CONTROL, ranging from cognitive distress and frustration – due to forced exposure to unfamiliar interaction abstractions – to an exhilarating sense of illusory interfacial omnipotence, could be directly linked to Bratton’s idea of interface as a THRESHOLD, defining boundaries of possibilities through conceptual, physical and visual GRID subdivisions, and bridging different perceptual dimensions at various scales, from micro, to global, to paranatural (cfr. the new-weird interpretation of the notion given in the CONTROL videogame, where a THRESHOLD is a physical location that act as doors towards other, non-earthly multiverses).  


This dualistic dynamic underpins the music, designed around the layering of two kinds of basic elements: 1) a recorded documentation of my struggles in learning to use the AnalogRytm while fruitlessly attempting to create proper techno tracks and 2) improvised, one-take sessions of modular synthesizer.  Edits are minimal, with all audible mistakes and uncertainties accumulated during the process happily preserved and exposed. Notwithstanding the use of stylistic tropes and methodological routines of techno music as foundational blocks, the final tracks eventually digressed from the dogma, featuring out-of-GRID elements, temporary losses of CONTROL, THRESHOLD-crossing events triggered by repetition-induced distraction and so on. 


The accompanying artworks revolve around GRIDS of generatively-produced, inscrutable interface signs. These were initially inspired by my personal experience of a disorienting interaction with an alien device I found in a Korean hotel (a fancy electronic-controlled, all-in-one toilet/bidet) that, paradoxically, mediated the execution of a primal corporal function via a riddling, symbol-filled panel that induced in me the exact feeling of interfacial discomfort discussed above. The visual output can be seen alternatively as an infinitely-sized board game, a large-scale communication device equipped with incongruously extruded app icons, or a randomized design of an abstract infrastructure, the latter recalling the overarching architectural motif of the project.  


References:

B. H. Bratton - The Stack | On Software and Sovereignty - thestack.org

Threshold (location) - Control Fandom Wiki - control.fandom.com/wiki/Threshold_(location)

www.gamespot.com/articles/how-remedys-control-will-trust-players-to-figure-o/1100-6468007/