Bill Seaman & John Supko - s_traits (2014)

18 Feb, 18:40
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Artist: Bill Seaman & John Supko
Title Of Album: s_traits
Year Of Release: 2014
Label: Cotton Goods
Genre: Electronic, Ambient, Modern Classical
Quality: 320 Kbps
Total Time: 77:03 min
Total Size: 179 MB
WebSite:

Tracklist:

01. providing the mix 3:22
02. the clicking 2:07
03. the memory of a moment 2:59
04. the doubled was doubled over 3:22
05. against the volume of the sea 2:50
06. the drunken train strayed from the tracks 1:44
07. chance & change motioning 2:50
08. the drive is on the blink 1:38
09. and the ice appeared blue 3:26
10. acting as they do as substitutions 3:12
11. coming to know the longing vocabulary 1:51
12. chance fell across the doorway 2:59
13. a recording of the lie 3:43
14. I had fallen for the delicacy 3:01
15. flung overboard as poetic justice 2:45
16. the absence of spoken words 2:59
17. the legacy hardware is put in motion 2:21
18. the angle of the lips 2:58
19. out from the straits 2:31
20. readymade for rrose 3:15
21. the ambassador of light 3:48
22. in flight 3:26
23. skyward across the horizon 4:39
24. predictably arcane 3:01
25. the hiding place 3:32
26. at the end of the mouth 2:44

s_traits is a new album of generative electronic music written by composer John Supko and media artist Bill Seaman on the Manchester, UK label Cotton Goods. s_traits is the product of three minds: two human, one artificial. With a discarded electronic track to the early version of Supko’s percussion duo Straits as a starting point, Supko and Seaman compiled more than 110 hours of audio source material over a three-year period, including field recordings, analog and digital noise, acoustic and electronic instruments, cassette recordings of Supko’s juvenilia, recordings of Seaman and Supko playing the piano (inside and out), and soundtracks from documentaries made in the 1960’s and 70‘s.

During that time, Supko developed – in part in conversations with Seaman – the intelligent bearings_traits software to “navigate” this vast ocean of sound. The program selects samples from the database – ranging from barely a second to a few minutes in length – and juxtaposes them to create spontaneous, multitrack compositions. Twenty-six of these “first drafts” have been developed by the two collaborators into the 77-minute album that is s_traits. Thirteen tracks were shaped by Supko, thirteen by Seaman, alternating odd- and even-numbered tracks (though they don’t disclose who worked on which.)