River Y - Pivot (2024)

Pivot is the debut LP from River Y, a new project from Raudie McLeod. A turn toward a new direction of sound which is less stylistically defined and more sonically open, drawing inspiration not only from music but from technological processes of the 21st century.
The project is replete with repurposing audio snippets from viral or obscure social media posts and abstracting them through technology ill fit for the purpose.
Or taking artificially generated sound sources and attempting to animate them like some sonic Frankenstein’s monster.
MIDI is used in a collage of ways, downloaded from random
internet websites and the reorganised in the DAW via software instruments. The structure of these songs can take meandering paths through textures and themes and then find themselves inside traditional compositional structures. Hints of McLeod’s past musical influences such as classical and dance can also be heard littered through the LP.

Coal lacks the purity to form diamonds. While useful to create energy, it inversely creates pollution.
Time is a tool which can transform. One could imagine that with a pure intention, you could create diamonds from coal. Humanity’s purity is more difficult to define. There are too many variables to consider. Nature is a chemical wizard and operates on magnitudes unfathomable to humankind. But we do have some form of intelligence at our disposal. Its relation to possibly existing large intelligences for now remains unknown. Art is a curious tool in that it does not seek to further our plight. It plays in the now, instead expanding laterally.
Art widens the scope of an eye which is coerced to gaze narrowly.