Taiwanese-Brooklyn transplant Calvin “Kai-Wei” Chang’s debut album Reprocessor is musical, dense and seemingly done-based, inflicting it to straddle quite a lot of genres from experimental to darkwave to IDM, however that’s not what units it aside. It’s the truth that it’s made completely from discovered sounds, recorded by Chang between 2020 and 2022; no further sounds or samples have been added. Meant to doc the modifications in life throughout COVID, Chang took these sounds and painstakingly reworked, re-engineered and, after all, reprocessed them till they made the visceral, flowing assertion piece that’s this album. Chang sums it up finest himself:
Reprocessor is a sonic documentation and “musicalization” of Covid19 period discovered sounds, with songs composed between 2020-2022. In lieu of standard “remodeling” of supply supplies, over two hours in size of uncooked recordings are repetitively strengthened, dissected and extracted for expressive sonic occasions.
When one actually stops to consider the truth that the supply materials on Reprocessor is the one materials, it’s type of mindboggling, particularly from the angle of an EDM producer; that is how digital music was initially shaped again within the Forties by way of the 60s and even as much as the 80s. Earlier than we had this large library of sounds for drums, kicks, snares, pianos and strings to switch for synths, all of these issues needed to be recoded, pitched, cleaned up, saved and handed on so there may even be synthesizers and programmers. We’re to this point modernized now that it’s all taken without any consideration and the sounds and area have turn out to be so clear and correct that new sounds are created from samples of samples of samples. So what occurs when a producer applies all this new tech to the grassroots sound sound loop format? Kaiwei has the reply.
It doesn’t appear Kaiwei’s intention with Reprocessor was to go grassroots in any method, however slightly to see what it could sound prefer to make full compositions out of discovered recordings utilizing fashionable gear. One may simply glean that even with fashionable advantages, it’s a painstaking and tedious means of math, code, and lower/copy/paste to get stated compositions lined up, layered and sounding something like music. The outcome, nevertheless, appears definitely worth the bother.
With quite a lot of instrumental musicians additionally contributing sounds to the album, Reprocessor may be very a lot nonetheless within the experimental realm of issues, and listening to it, one can simply perceive how he’s earned a popularity for his compositions accompanying multimedia artwork instillations and avant garde performing arts items. That stated, it’s additionally very a lot tinged with drone, industrial and even deep home sounds. The musicality of many items, such because the title monitor, “Breakbeat Funky 102” (in case you assume there’s something resembling a standard breakbeat on this monitor, you’d be lifeless unsuitable) and the “Tors” sequence is likely to be exhausting to seek out on first pay attention, however hold listening. By means of the drone and chaos, virtually each a part of these tracks it an truly fairly delicate piece of symphony-like composition.
Different tracks, equivalent to “Id” (the one monitor with a discernable beat), “4u” and the endlessly ambient “Duet” sound extra trad musical however that’s solely as a result of they’re additionally fairly melodic and have recognizable music sounds. What Reprocessor asks of the listener is to take the album as a complete and join the dots so the music could be heard in any a part of the composition. “Chung Yeung,” a our YEDM premiere at this time, is the primary monitor on the album and appears to be a preview of this obvious dichotomy, straddling the heavy and the chic and discovering music in each components.
The opening monitor of this report, “Chung Yeung” is in of itself a compilation of brief compositional and sonic concepts, that each one sprung from a sequence of freely improvised, live-processed trombone and vocal performances. The multi-sectional kind foreshadows the overarching construction of the total report, in addition to a few of its key sonic components and themes.
Named after the well-known lunar calendar competition (loosely translated at “Double Ninth Competition” because it takes place on the ninth day of the ninth month), a day of remembrance the place the Chinese language and Taiwanese individuals climb mountains to their ancestors’ graves to scrub, keep and go away items, “Chung Yeung” units a somber tone for the album: that is each a remembrance of the struggles of COVID and maybe those that misplaced their lives, and a clearing out and “reprocessing” of these ghostly sounds and energies from a interval many people are nonetheless making an attempt to course of.
The realm of experimental music serves as a vanguard instance of what could also be doable in industrial music and stated industrial musicians look to artists like Kaiwei to push that boundary for them. Nevertheless within the case of Reprocessor, it appears Kaiwei can also be saying it’s vital to know ones roots and hone one’s compositional expertise as properly. COVID confirmed humanity its personal limitations; we’re one photo voltaic flare away from shedding most if not all of our digital assets, however Kaiwei and others who know methods to create music from their very own loops would probably be main the cost in that case. Within the meantime, capturing the vitality and feeling of such a tumultuous time can also be vital. If nothing else, Reprocessor exhibits that creativity will all the time discover a method, and that it’ll even make new methods for sound and expression with just some discovered loops, a heap of persistence and a should be heard.
Reprocessor releases on Monday, October ninth and will likely be out there to stream on Spotify (the place a number of tracks are already out there) and could be pre-ordered for buy on Kaiwei’s Bandcamp web page.
