Recordings of a home-made string instrument with a central bridge (you might call it a “zither”). the design of this instrument, which is played by two players plucking / strumming / striking the strings on opposite sides of the bridge, is such that the actions of a player on one side of the strings effects the tone of the strings played by the other player. as one side of a string vibrates, bends, becomes tight or relaxed, the pitch of the opposite side responds in a mirror-like fashion. harmonies float around, not fixed in place, but come back to rest in a rough middle. the digital version (what you hear here) has undergone an additional process: automated noise-reduction software attempts to discern a “signal” from the background sound of the original recordings, listening for its own version of music ;)

There are characters in “EXISTERS”, the cast of a play, a continuum of roles there for the taking: EXISTERS, DOERS, REPEATERS, CREEPERS and STREETERS, and this is for them:

EXISTERS resist without intervening, subsist without consuming. They are everything about living except life, showing the effects of attention on a thing over time. “EXISTERS” harkens to all things slow, delicate, and sharp–music for drifters, onlookers, and aliens of the everyday,

The EXISTER, the lurker in the dusty corner, is the one who watches, and by watching brings an event to life.  EXISTERS are embodied by the Low Frequency Oscillator, an undertow that never fully begins or ends, that saturates a space with unresolved attention.

The DOERS possess an industriousness, a momentum.  DOERS power through nothing and name it something. DOERS prefer the sunshine, while EXISTERS prefer the shade. The DOERS are embodied by the sequencer, a sense of movement, a ticking, a clicking, a powerful feeling of action, an attitude and a voice.

For REPEATERS, held separate from beginnings, too wearied by the present to energetically greet the future, change has lost meaning. REPEATERS, opposed to stability, sleepily perpetuate lability: after an infinitesimal perturbation, they have left their initial state for ever.

CREEPERS are pure effort, negative pleasure, growing from a lack, a vacuum, not from any need or desire. Working a job, moving in spasms from stop to stop.

STREETERS imitate, mock, lampoon and profane. They reproduce, they wear costumes. They protest, producing expressions of objection, negating and cancelling. The STREETERS are engaged in “civil disobedience”–a polite (eg. non-violent) refusal, as well as a refusal of politeness (removing oneself from the rule of law).

EXISTERS can be exhausted, weighed down, asleep, but EXISTERS don’t remove themselves from the world while sleeping, or spacing out, or changing speed. For the EXISTER these are ways of being in the world, of staking a position against an ecstatic background. These are gentle, lazy, face-to-face contacts with infinity.

Plural titles indicate the proliferation of life. In all its disparate values and manifestations, life multiplies.

Most of Shape Tape was recorded live inside of this shape, an egg-shaped bottom-entry steam sauna made by Michael Parker, who sat inside with us while we recorded. Shape Tape was also recorded live in two other places, Charles Long’s house on Mount Baldy, and Liz Glynn’s shipping pallet pyramid in Lincoln Heights. Thank you to these artists / makers of great shapes!

Optical illusions have a healthy life in the world—as puzzles, cognitive experiments, quiz tricks, and platforms for mind-bending artworks—but auditory illusions (tricks of the ear) are less well documented, less well understood. Two examples of auditory illusions that were discovered relatively long ago, Risset rhythms and Shepard tones, deal with pitches or looping patterns that give the appearance of constant motion in a single direction: infinite acceleration, or a pitch that is always rising—the sonic equivalent of a barber pole stripe, moving upwards as it rotates (the opposite effect, a pitch continuously descending or a rhythm forever slowing down, also qualify). Examples of these illusions privilege the smooth, consistent rise: seamless and eternal. But what about the lumpy, striped or stepped rise, hopscotching or leapfrogging forward? Isn’t there something salient and familiar about a clumsy version of vertigo?

Accelerationism proposes an end-game scenario for capitalism that either transcends the currently visible horizon, entering some unforeseen landscape (free from constraint), or results in technological singularity—in either case, eternal acceleration suggests moving along an asymptote so extreme that it provokes an ontological shift for everyone. These sounds play with the auditory illusion of continuous acceleration, but with a particular focus on the clumsy, spontaneous, and sporadic leaps that reflect our own engagement with progress. Two steps forward one step back; we digest the shapes of boundaries, constraints, and borders which attempt to guide us into smooth channels, as we blindly expand forever in wild directions.