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Matthew D. Gantt - New​.​Wav #1

from Mixtape 2017 by Not Art Records

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Artist: Matthew D. Gantt
Track: New.Wav #1
gantt.works

New.Wavs is a study of the overlapping manner in which contemporary digital culture is produced and consumed, often with the same technological means.

The development of this project will consist of identifying a 'definitive' set of tools used in the production of contemporary music, then pairing these tools with iconic examples of their use, delineating a type of auditory and stylistic corpus.

Once these sets of material are established, compositional processes can be devised wherein information from these examples (midi notes/CC, spectral content, amplitude, etc) may be mapped back onto the use of the tools themselves, mimicking the recursion that occurs when stylistic tropes made for consumption become available wholesale as building blocks for new cultural production.

This method of creating work with information extracted from the means of its own production hopes to explore the formal structures encoded in both the tools and tropes of digital creation and consumption.
Initial research for this project has focused on the Lex Luger sample pack, a free collection of drum samples and VSTs available online and geared towards the creation of 'trap music', a popular subset of hip hop exemplified by the work of Lex Luger, whose production style has been widely imitated since it first achieved mainstream success in 2010.
Initial studies for New.Wavs have taken iconic works by Lex Luger as a source of compositional data, using each piece as input material to be analyzed for structural form and content, then routing that analysis back onto a variety of production systems containing the Lex Luger sample set with no other intervention.

This process will result in the creation of a set of pieces lasting the same duration as their input sources, and represent an attempt to apply a Cage-ian embrace of indeterminacy to the context of commercial production, as well as an attempt to turn the gaze of contemporary consumption back on itself, removing the middleman and creating a metaphorical network of self-propagating digital culture. These concepts are intended to build on Kim Cascone's writings on the 'Aesthetics of Failure' by foregrounding previously unexamined details as content, as well as the work of Stefan Goldmann in 'Presets: Digital Shortcuts to Sound'.

Once completed, the final realization of New.Wavs will consist of a long-running suite of recorded works to be presented online, the precise number and length to be determined by the initial cultural input selected for analysis.

Specific commercial tools to be investigated for this project include a variety of DAW's, several production suites sold by Berlin's Native Instruments, Roland's confusingly-named 'futuristic' reissues
of classic hardware, and a variety of sample packs or 'producer kits' available online, among others.

Some techniques to be used as part of New.Wavs include the creative misuse of popular audio-to-midi tools, concatenative synthesis patches developed at IRCAM (CataRT), the Python script AudioGrep, as well as Ableton Live 9's ability to upload recordings directly to social media via SoundCloud.

These processes are intended not only as a technique with which to engage source material, but as a methodology for conceptualizing the manner in which the tropes embedded in these tools inform our engagement with the production, consumption and dissemination of digital cultural itself.

Matthew D. Gantt (b. 1987 Durham, NC) is a composer and conceptualist based in New York City. He studied composition at CUNY Brooklyn College under the direction of Morton Subotnick, history and theory with David Grubbs, and contemporary performance practice with Jason Eckardt.

Gantt’s compositional work focuses primarily on the creative use of live electronics, issues of embodiment and environment in digital performance, and the use of open form scores and systems. Areas of inquiry and research include the overlap of contemporary artistic production and consumption, artificial scarcity in the age of digital reproduction, and the recorded document as confluence of artifact and event.

While living in New York, Gantt has performed or presented work at a range of venues, including Roulette, Issue Project Room, Irondale Center, Silent Barn, the New Museum and the Stone, as well as internationally at the IRCAM Academy in Paris, France. While at CUNY, he was awarded the John Cage prize for experimental composition, the Nancy Hagar scholarship award for his text ‘Music in a Post-Digital Culture: Thoughts for the Twenty-First Century Composer’, and the Tow Graduate Stipend for International Research.

Matthew D. Gantt currently teaches at the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music (BC-CCM), SMS High School through the Kaufman Center, and works as a studio assistant to Morton Subotnick and Joan La Barbara.

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from Mixtape 2017, released July 17, 2017

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