Flanger
Bio
Agents from a more distant future, Flanger echo JG Ballard, pondering the question ”Which way to inner space?"Kubrick's vision of 2001 showed us that the quest for space exploration is, of course, underpinned by an inner journey. Flanger pose in silver space suits for the cover art, recalling the anecdote about Salvador Dali, who donned a diver's suit to deliver a lecture, and nearly suffocated. As a playful apparition of an alternate future, it sure beats all those laptop clicks, eh?
It's with these thoughts uppermost that the third Flanger collaboration (following ”Midnight Sound” and ”Templates”) is born and finds our heroes stretching their musical horizons in most unusual ways, both in recording methods and song construction. So, business as usual for two of contemporary music's keenest adventurers. Recent output includes Con Ritmo and Plays Love Songs on Friedman's own Nonplace label and Burnt Friedman & The Nu Dub Players on Scape, along with parallel works from Atom™ as Atom Heart, Señor Coconut, Geeez'n'Gosh and LB: both concerned the blurring of sound definitions between artificial and real. Previous Flanger music may have sounded like full jazz outfits later processed - but in fact, they were both entirely programmed.
This time however, new co-ordinates and parameters were set. Friedman, based in Cologne, and Atom™, located in Santiago de Chile, programme the tracks, building in specific contributions from sympathetic musicians around the world: in Copenhagen, in Cologne, in Santiago. They resume their predilection for unlikely time signatures: 5; 7; 9; sometimes several in the space of one track.
Flanger discover music of intuition and chance. Questions of authorship arise, as it did when Miles Davis was recording with producer Teo Macero in the seventies, where spontaneous improvisations then savagely edited essentially reinvented the original compositions.