Elektro Seoul by AKASHIC RECORDS

This is an album composed a few years ago, & lost, about the same time as Twin Oscillators, in the wake of the pandemic. I had just seen the director's cut of Bladerunner & I wanted to make a dystopian futuristic soundtrack to a non-existent sci-fi noir movie, a techno Alphaville. I needed a model city, one I didn't know at all, in order to have no preconceptions, only visual suggestions that came from the imagery I found online. I did no special research about the history of Seoul city although I am sure it is fascinating. My album was to be a city made of sounds, without history or a city in post-history. I recalled that I spent 6 hours at the Seoul airport on a lay-over to Tokyo once, watching the night skyline pale up into a murky yellow dawn of smog. I thought even back then about the techno-megapolis, the endless white lights of electrical modernist autobahns, flows of exhaust, permanent insomnia, ghosts of forgotten villages absorbed into the conurbation, devoured whole by mechanical madness, their sounds projecting themselves in the form of incessant robot squabbles and the collapsing mirrored panoramas of endless shimmering but filthy glass window-panes, facades, impenetrable, impersonal, too real and therefore surreal. And then finding in those spaces of absolute alienation some spirit of reflection, entering other dimensions through ricochets, cascades, impulses of purely fugitive sound, I imagined through these sounds a way to marvel at the space oddity of it all. All of this is still linked to life. And made myself dance a bit in the skull.
Even on my feet. Maybe some of this works this way for you too.
Let me know.

Instruments: Hacked Roland MC-303, Arturia Microfreak Synth,
No-Input Mixer, Audiomulch, Beatpad App

Jeff Gburek
October 14, 2022

Guitarist, composer, sound designer, field recordist, shortwave radio poet, blending electro-acoustic, electronica, spectral comp., cracked circuits, sounding organic objects with an ear towards earth voices. Studied Javanese and Balinese gamelan and theories of Partch and Xenakis. Working with dance/theater/butoh co. Djalma Primordial Science. More than 400 concerts throughout Europe since 2005.

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