Arp City

I had the idea of using multiple, perforated (gappy), improvised instances of generative sequences, using melodic “arp” content, or with drum machine type patterns. A “city” of generative, stacked, bubbling tiers of ARPeggiated figures. I had a city in mind because they shoot up everywhere like tall buildings in a sea of active, ever-shifting textural patterns.

A deeper level of music can be reached by long, intuitively evolving, soaring energetic lines that dissolve the sense of time that inhibits free flow and can speak from a stronger but also more selfless consciousness that dissolves stray impressions and goes deep.

In this album I developed a technique of improvisation with holes, allowing the building of energy without saturating the field with all the sounds all the time, the components are orbiting, not always heard but always felt and present.

Whereas techno, house, and EDM are about the selection of a continuous appealing loop or structure, ARP CITY subverts this by continual introduction of disruptive yet evolving sound. ARP CITY (there is actually a real one, in Texas!) is an approach of perforated layerings, something I developed for floating music but here it is used on its antithesis, bubbling and dynamically active streams of joyously abrasive massages of the mind and its manager.

I felt like pushing the envelope on what could be done ONLY in a studio with sleight of hand. But now, having created the album, I’d like to recover the material into a concert performable format, which looks more than possible.

— Lawrence Ball