Check out today’s featured track from THE ENTERTAINMENT, Immigrant Breast Nest’s five-year-anniversary compilation: Sun Ra’s Car by BlipVert. Relentless electron interactions, spew effects, a retaliation and inside-out free-jazz battle form.
We asked BlipVert for some additional info about the track, music-making procedures, and approach to sound. We’ll be having mini-interviews like this with each of the contributors to THE ENTERTAINMENT.
1) Tell us a bit about your contribution to The Entertainment. Is it typical of your music? Are there any sounds/processes/elements in it that you haven’t included before? Were you trying to go for any specific listener reaction?
Sun Ra’s Car is built off of a half-finished composition I had on my hard drive for awhile which I initially titled ‘noodlechicken’. The original track was inspired by the Captain Beefheart song ‘When Big Joan Sets Up’ which is one of my all time favs. I would say this track departs slightly from my past work in that the rhythmic elements stay mostly consistent (e.g. metric perpetuity, odd meter loops built off of percussive source material); there isn’t as much heavy soundfile editing and splicing which normally characterizes my compositions. However, in place of this, there’s a giant battle between a distorted Rhodes piano and an organ throughout the piece. This, along with the blasting rhythms, gives the impression (in my opinion) of an intense small ensemble free jazz jam. Someone once described my electronic music as having the energy/characteristics of 60s and 70s free jazz. I guess I tried to capture that essence on this track in a more vivid way.
Often times, I have no idea what the hell I’m doing in any area of life. Music (and art) is the only thing that’s really ever felt right or made sense to me. So yeah, I suppose I’m better off musically than I am in life. Truthfully, I don’t really walk around….I kind of wander aimlessly.
I have no idea what noise really is, but if I had to define it in the context of my own musical work, I’d say it’s controlled chaos. Most of my compositions are so severely chaotic to the point that most people could interpret them at face value as ‘noise.’ However, I try to retain a significant measure of control over my work in my home studio and at live gigs, which for me is important in terms of successful execution. What’s really fun though is when things get so beyond my own authority that happy accidents create situations I never intended or considered, which shows me how exciting chaos (i.e. noise) can be when it isn’t controlled.
I gave this track the title Sun Ra’s Car primarily because that’s the first thing that came to mind: the image of Sun Ra hauling ass down the street in a vehicle equipped with two keyboards which propel the vehicle forward, and the more aggressively they’re played the faster it goes. The trippy ending section for me represents Sun Ra ascending into space, returning to the cosmos to travel the universe in his special car. Whatever image/thought/emotion/idea the listener takes away from this track is completely up to them…I like to think I painted a picture of some kind.
Definitely check out my recent collaborative release on Immigrant Breast Nest with Mysterious House (James Mercer) and Peter Seligman, entitled ‘edgePinkyoutub.’ This was completed back in September 2014, and we did a few gigs back in the NYC area to support it. We each composed a track and then remixed each others’ tracks. I’m really proud of all the work we did for this record, and it’s totally slamming from beginning to end, not to mention it covers a lot of ground stylistically. I have a new track, entitled ‘Elders of the Mir’, appearing on DTrash’s 200th release compilation that’s be out on February 14th. Excited about this track as it incorporates more of a ‘metal’ vibe, and I plan for it to be the first in a song cycle about the Russian peasantry. Being Bay Area localized for now, I’ll be doing 5lowershop’s annual Monsters of Love festival later this month, and there are a number of sporadic BlipVert gigs occurring over the next few months in the Bay Area with hopeful talk of a west coast run of dates with some dudes out here. There is a slight possibility I’ll be relocating to Canada next fall for some academic/compositionally oriented things, but that’s a big if….
Much thanks to Immigrant Breast Nest for putting this all together! Hope you enjoy listening!
-Derek Tibs (CEO, Immigrant Breast Nest)
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