Jeremy Young

A member of poetry_sound duo Cloud Circuit, electroacoustic modern classical trio Sontag Shogun, and library music waveriders Associated Sine Tone Services, Young’s long-evolving solo practice makes use of a sine and square wave oscillator system, 1/4″ magnetic tape, filtered radio and EMF signal, and foley-inspired sound treatments from amplified surfaces and objects. Taking cues from his reverberant, cyclical live performances in flow and texture, the works that make up Cablcar each derived from scraps of found reel-to-reel tape material sourced on eBay and sampled by splicing; leaning into Cagean chance processes and adapted collage techniques influenced by the Fluxus expressionism of Joseph Beuys. This elemental tape matter is supplemented with tone clusters, ostinati, and legato melodic phrases sputtered out by very cranky hardware machines.

Because Young’s “Studieau Royale” is outfitted with monophonic oscillators, every note on Cablcar was tuned by hand and employed by attenuation. No keyboards, no synths, no digital plugins or VSTs — all frequency dials, voltage cutoff knobs, tubes and magnets; pure electricity. This tactile praxis combined with a haptics-sensitive deep listening ethos, anchors his McLuhan-esque credo that the tonal content of a musical work is equally as meaningful as the auditory medium on which it was recorded, edited, and played back.

Thus, Cablcar won’t sound like most electronic music served up via the nearest algorithm — this music is lo-fi on every level. Berlin-based engineer (and curator of the Morphine Records label) Rabih Beaini mixed the entire record on an analog board, linearly with hands roaming the faders throughout, while Guillermo Pizarro’s mastering explicitly emphasizes tape hiss and forgotten auditory artefacts in the signal. In this way, the music also perfectly matches the visual artistry of filmmaker Charles-André Coderre, who contributed chemically-deconstructed 16mm celluloid imagery to both the album’s artwork and the video for the primary single, “Judy.”