John Wall - Computer
editing / sampling / composition / sound manipulation.

Alex Rodgers - Voice (both tracks) and voice manipulations (track1)

Allen Fisher - Text. No Longer Alone

Paul Richardson - Mastering
fixationpoint.co.uk

‘Cubist’ was the first word that popped into my head when I heard “Wrongfoot”; the first few seconds shudder violently into existence—a birth—skidding between warped chords and time-stretched percussive blasts, one moment collapsing the stereo field into a focused, centered beam of energy and the next exploding it beyond its suddenly narrow limits. Far from frantic and frenetic, this music moves at both a glacial and hyper pace; while shattered drum-hits fly by at warp speed, tendrils of sound snake their way upwards to the surface, only to be submerged once again in a roiling sea of snaps and thuds. Moments after Alex Rodgers’ AutoTuned voice comes crashing in, the piece takes a thrilling left turn, taking it from the best ‘computer music’ has to offer to something else entirely: suddenly there is stillness, a beautiful drone, carried by waves of Rodgers’s words (“Spare them the shit / Make them a bulwark / Spread across the mats and slices / Over the blood and mulch and bones”). Then—it’s over. “...The dark shop.” Enormous, life-affirming music. 
“Wrongfoot” sounds instantly recognizable, loaded with connotations (club sounds, AutoTune, ‘electroacoustic’ glitch work), but somehow also utterly alien; the sources (materials and techniques) are at once cleanly obliterated in the process of abstraction and also preserved—they live on in the final product, grounding it, against the tempting impulse to categorize this music as purely ‘abstract’ or ‘illegible.’ Even art this opaque has a clear origin story, and that story should be told—through the art itself. Here is where the still admittedly shaky cubist analogy still holds water: Wall doesn’t strive for an absolute ‘total abstraction’ here, but rather a decisive, tactical fracturing of reality, of the world as it exists—“Wrongfoot” lives not in the realm of the Spirit or the twelve-tone row, but, well, on earth, just as distinct objects can still be perceived in cubist works. But far from flattening his work into some kind of didactic, ‘representational’ or ‘figurative’ document (or a cynical, metatextual ‘suturing’ of materials with little interest in formal beauty or unity), this rootedness only strengthens its impact, pushing us—through the art itself, not through a nonsensical press release and bombastic PR campaign—to truly think about the conditions from which this music emerged, and the conditions into which it is emerging.
Wall cites one Mr. Bill as a sample source, a self-described “leader in the audio production world for years” who mostly seems to make garish dubstep sample packs. This seemingly bizarre decision perfectly exemplifies Wall’s fundamental philosophy: what is seemingly ‘new’ is not new, but rather assembled from the scattered debris of history and cultural production, always building off of what is already there. Any perceived ‘newness’ comes not from some kind of divine “summoning” of sound from the abyss (or from, say, code written from scratch, a deceptive way to feign abstract ‘originality’ while sidestepping the context and tradition from which that language was built, or the fact that millions of lines of code have been repeatedly written ‘from scratch’ to produce the same handful of tired sounds), but rather from recontextualizing, rearranging, fragmenting and manipulating this debris (whether in the form of technique or actual sound material), which in turn produces certain ruptures... and so on. It’s already been done, so why not steal it?
There are admittedly many works that could also lead to this perhaps obvious conclusion; but “Wrongfoot” stands out for its unwavering commitment to music. “Wrongfoot” reveals the fundamental paradox that lies at the heart of Wall’s work. On the one hand, there is a deep pessimism regarding art and cultural production: this work seems to indicate that everything has already been recorded, played, performed, copied, co-opted; we in 2020 are left with the rubble, reduced to sifting through Mr. Bill’s discography for samples, constantly asking ourselves, “What now?” On the other hand, there is a deep optimism: Wall’s work points towards the twists and turns of cultural and technological history that led—through, yes, Mr. Bill—to this singular, discrete work; everything has already been recorded, played, performed, copied, co-opted—YES—and this is only the beginning, something that can transmute shit to gold. There is nothing ‘new’—that is precisely where the new emerges. —Sunik Kim
‘


1 Wrong Foot the Servants & The Dark Shop
text by Alex Rodgers

Wrongfoot the Servants

Spare them the shit
Make them a bulwark.
Spread across the mats and slices.
Over the blood and mulch and bones
Teeming breaches of the
Mats and patches.
Flashing glipses through chinks and slits!
Wrongfoot the servants!
Have them:
Buy a cypher
Buy a 'jelly snake'
Them all agitated underlings
With useless mumanddad
AND fucking useles
Overlordladylandier.
Setter upper
Aspirant escapologist
In fjord
quirk of outersphere
Milky and nacreous smudging offset outland.
And (sensible) fear of promise in pearl
After.
You to are useless.
One overitem to another...
ALLWAYS....
Pulling back to citade


The Dark Shop

Mac truck poised to rot.
The rising prow in this frozen time.
Incantations.
On frozen rake.
Grizzled jaw by broken gate
a pedal stool of frosted clods, clogged indents top
walls of rubberine ,sagging, alien...
Oh membrane.
Solidified bloom on powders in medium..
Someones big black 'dildonics'
at all the wakes the lovelies smirking
In blacks ,filigree on swelling
with the butchers
with smirking, winning residue-irradiated crimson 'bolt on'
The frantic action round the pit
multiform probosci.
Flys eggs layed in lanes (the direction of travel)
The perpetual flailing of the livers.
The dark shop.

Alex Rodgers flanex@gmail.com



2 No Longer Alone
Poem ( parts 1 & 2 of 28 ) written by Allen Fisher


No Longer Alone
One

the erasure cycle is a function of our tipping point
you feel this in your chest and eyes
we are focussed by a custom-built optical tweezer
to the diffraction limit in this trap
small populations plan to get off the planet before this
their baggage remains on the runway
the tilt force averages over situations
in which our memory is switched to zero
we are too late for dissipation and noise immunity
we are irreversible
our physics of forgetting coexists
with our absence of care
aspiration to the intervention of intelligence
has been cancelled
stochastic energetics complement the resonance of collisions
thank you for your space and time you are no longer needed
dissipative processes summarise connections
between information and thermodynamics
individuals and hooded neighbours a
re monitored by their speed
by opening and closing the door to a bi-chamber
a technician collects
the faster or hot in one chamber the slower or cold in the other
determined by the stupidity of our decisions
there is no next time
we are all in this together
the erasure cycle is a function of our tipping point
we are no longer alone

two

before our tiredness sets the scale
our networks facilitate cooperation our social distance
crucial like genetic relations or knowing who we are with
to constrain the spread of pathogens
fear extinction causes partial erasure of fear memories
the degrees of remodeled spine induced by a crowd in the head
are the conditions that correlate with your extinction
correlate with the expression of your fibres
there is no neutral stimulus we are
repaired with the presentation of a conditioned response
repeated exposures to this diminish
our expression diminish our fortitude
fear regulates our activities
and only seems to overlap
our neuronal populations migrate into the amygdala,
the hippocampus and the front of the cortex
excited in a tailgate when the trees are frying
you’d think the weather change suddened
why would anyone water the plants
soon we will be in flight
you’d think cognitive declines were constrained
by something like blockage of gene transcription
and of course we try to reverse
with an epigenetic switch
the oil market may have tipped into a phase transition
and production may now be burnt inelastic
but these are merely surfaces and nanostructures
before our tiredness sets the scale

allenfisher.co.uk/recent-publications/


Sound fragments taken from
leefraser.bandcamp.com/album/cor-unvers
tommudd.bandcamp.com/releases
mrbill.bandcamp.com