Uncertain Data Packed In Red Boxes
Bluermutt takes a foray into the world of minimal sound design and composition. Clear and clean tones are explored and unpacked into a series of beautiful abstract expressions.
Bluermutt describes his creative process as…
"With years of practice I created some kind of a creative environment where I like to move and make things happen. I usually start with many raw ideas and sketches which evolve as I work on the ones I prefer. The code to my creative process would look like:
1. act
2. collect the results of the action
3. select between the results
4. back to point 1"
Tracklisting:
- Pack My Shit And Disappear
- Chain Smoking
- I Don't Like To Talk
- The Lonely Fridge
- C/Zamora105/7pm
- Purple Grain
- Underscore
Bluermutt
A 26 year old Barcelona based computer-music maker in love with digital noises and beats. His previous works have appeared on Nexsound, Insubordination, Vague Terrain & the Audiobulb Root of Sine project.
Who are you?
Barcelona based 26 years old computer-music maker in love with digital noises and mainstream beats.
Why do you write music?
I make music with the intent to understand how the music I like has been made really. I think what pushes me to arrange sounds in my computer is mainly curiosity and the satisfaction I get when I'm able to make something that works as well as the things I like. I relate to music like "This is amazing. I gotta be able to do something like this". Then I bang my head until I don't get something that resembles what at first was a mystery to me.
How would you describe your music?
Heavily structured sound collages. Lot of layers, many ways to read them, many things to look for. This is true for a few things that I'm satisfied with, the rest is pure exercise.
What does this album mean to you?
This album is an unusual turn from my everyday production as bluermutt but in the end I decided not to use a different moniker for it because even though it sounds so different it is totally related to the rest of my production. You wouldn't think this is a bluermutt album but to me working on Uncertain Data Packed In Red Boxes has been just taking some of the usual elements of my music and expanding them, completely focusing on them and see what structures would come out of that. Anyway, this album has been quite a challenge because I usually tend to put so many layers in my music.. definitely not minimal. :-)
Can you elaborate on some of your creative processes?
I have this big sound library I build on a daily base, containing sounds coming from many different sources: other people samples, sound libraries, stuff I recorded, improvised sets, loops from my own tunes etc. I usually start with something from the library and see where it takes me. Most of the time I don't have a clear idea of what the music is gonna sound like but with years of practice I created some kind of "creative environment" where I like to move and I know how to make things happen that may take me to a direction I like. I usually start tons of raw ideas and sketches and then I slowly keep working on the ones I prefer. So I guess that if you had to code my creative process the main instructions would be something like this:
1- act
2 - collect the results of the action
3 - select between them
4 - back to point 1
From a more technical point of view I mainly cut and paste, process sounds, record them, cut again, and so on, using lot of different software and arranging everything on Live or Nuendo.
What are your future plans?
Releasing the "proper" bluermutt new album, play more gigs, work on some more dance-floor oriented stuff, collaborate with a friend of mine from NY on some techno-hiphop kind of thing, get more analog, learn french, perform the audiovisual performance that me and Cristobal from Aer Studio are developing.
Reviews
Boomkat
Wonderfully streamlined and elegant electronic compositions from Catalonian digital composer Bluermutt, whose quiet, evocative tones and gently abstracted sound designs mark themselves out as somehow more approachable and ear-friendly than most. Anyone who remembers the micro-glitch moments of Ensemble's Rephlex debut will appreciate the tiny textural world this 26-year old artist opens up, from the glass-like granulations of 'Pack My Shit And Disappear' to the Ryoji Ikeda-like fractures and ruptures of 'I Don't Like To Talk'. Tremendously lovely stuff this, yet best of all, it never descends into syrupy droning harmonies as so many records do these days - there aren't even any field recordings of birds! Rejoice!
Touching Extremes
Young chap from Barcelona, utilizing computerized structures to concoct 34 minutes of engagingly charming sounds: a little pseudo-mercury here, a pinch of melodic minimalism there, gentle noises everywhere, and you're done. No pretence of probing who knows what inscrutable universes, just a series of easily assimilated processes that sound as surprising results of a game rather than actual compositions. I mean, typical blips and pulses appear more or less always yet, strangely enough, they don't get me annoyed as usual. In other occasions we would have deemed something like this as totally inadequate but a sort of candid ingenuousness is detectable in a number of parts of this work, which sweetens the soul of a callous reviewer after all.
Textura
In Uncertain Data Packed in Red Boxes, Bluermutt, an unidentified twenty-six-year-old, Barcelona-based computer music maker who's previously issued material on Nexsound, provides a thirty-five-minute tour through his hermetic sound world. The seven tracks in this case are dominated by interactions between clean tones, pops, blips, and whirrs in an equally clean, digitally-created environment. The glassy-toned, gamelan-inflected opener, “Pack My Shit and Disappear,” is considerably more meditative and delicate in spirit than its irreverent title might suggest; an Eastern sensibility permeates “Chain Smoking” too, when tiny electronic droplets coalesce into slow-moving, criss-crossing patterns. Drum sounds rather inexplicably surface during “C Zamora 105.7 Pm” to give the track added momentum but not so much that Bluermutt's affinity for glacial tempi is compromised. Other acoustic sounds emerge too (electric guitar and clarinet, if I'm not mistaken), which in turn give the track a radically different character from the microsound style heard elsewhere. The material isn't wholly bereft of rhythm either, as attested to by the funk feel that gradually asserts itself during the second half of “Purple Grain.” There's an austere and minimalistic quality to “I Don't Like to Talk” as well as some of the other pieces that suggests Bluermutt wouldn't sound out of place as part of Raster-Noton's roster. In general, the EP could be characterized as headphones music that, analogically, is much like organisms moving about in semi-intelligble formations in a manner that would most clearly be seen via microscope.