Cycle by Beckstrom
Recorded December 7-14, 2016
I find myself most creative working with limitations. Regularly I'll use style or genre as the main limitation and work to create a "_____ album." In the past, I've done this with other styles I love, like dub (https://chrisbeckstrom.bandcamp.com/album/beck-dub), funk (https://chrisbeckstrom.bandcamp.com/album/beck-funk), hip-hop (https://chrisbeckstrom.bandcamp.com/album/fish-on), and 8-bit/chiptune (https://chrisbeckstrom.bandcamp.com/album/power-up).
Recent political events have motivated me to create more aggressive music, and coupled with my love of all things synthesizers, techno is a perfect vehicle. Although I've dabbled with techno/house as long as I've been making music with computers (the late 90's!) I've never devoted a whole album to the style.
I'm especially interested in the lineage from the original electronic music pioneers– the folks making musique concrete and Futurists like Luigi Russolo and his "Art of Noise" manifesto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Noises) to our current day, when practically everything anyone hears comes from a synthesizer or a computer. We are inundated with noises, and yet most music remains overwhelmingly tonal, melodic, and rhythmically simple. Certainly all types of music are valid, but I'd like to investigate the atonal, highly rhythmic world of techno; African rhythms mixed with German krautrock and filtered through the minds of suburban Detroit teenagers in the 80's. I'm interested in the music machines want to make.
So here it is. You can call it a musical catharsis. No real chords or harmony, just thumping, aggressive beats and sounds.
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Album cover: Sort of what a techno beat with a synth pad on top looks like when I hear it (I have synesthesia: http://chrisbeckstrom.com/syn/ )
