Pulsar Threads

Overactive sound Events weave and unravel Frayed pulsar threads snap Pulsar Threads is the latest of a series of works that aim to inject the sound and morphology of pulsar synthesis into my practice while maintaining active continuity with prior work. This music is about 17 minutes long. This music is also about 17 years long, the length of my practice so far of working with different kinds and orders of improvising with an established but still evolving performance ecosystem (1) in ways that are influenced by both early tape works and modern turntablism. Specifically, Pulsar Threads explores, often simultaneously, buffer scratching, corpus scrubbing, waveform scuffing, live sampling and a range of time-based, spectral and neural transformations of material sourced from the New Pulsar Generator (nuPg) (2). To borrow a phrase from Bolt’s work on practice-led research, if there is any magic to be found here, “the magic is in the handling” (3) and concerned with material thinking. This music is characterised by fast moving detail, development and interactions between sound objects and embodied technique to make connections in material through superimposition, stratification, juxtaposition and interpolation. I love the sound of pulsar synthesis, it can be pushed to so many different kinds of sonic places, but I just can’t play nuPg fast enough, or really, I can’t play it fast enough with the required precision and agility for creating responsive real-time onset, continuation and closure of sound events at multiple time-scales that cluster and collide then fragment and dissipate, with varied and morphing envelopes, arcs and sharp changes in direction. Maybe I just need to practice more! Keep’s concept of “instrumentalising” is the discovery of the inherent character and opportunities for manipulation of sound in sounding objects (4), and since 2007 I’ve been working towards instrumentalising high resolution multidimensional surfaces in combination with MaxMSP software and digital sound files in order to achieve rapid gestural and textural transformations of pre-recorded sound files of varied character and differing durations, from milliseconds to minutes. Beginning with a graphics tablet and what has been described as ‘mixed sensing’ I’ve explored a range of typical tablet gestures (5) which, together with scrubbing and scratching, include dipping and bowing across different kinds of sampling and synthesis methods and material. Additional interfaces augmenting