Genetics and Windsurfing builds music around negative space – you don’t
have to listen very closely to realize that you’re in the vicinity of an actual
black hole, and whatever sound Daniel Jasniewski, the man behind the Genetics,
decides to issue from his computery bank of beats and effects and samples and
other neat stuff is soon obliterated from immediate time and space by the
presence of the celestial object. As soon as a note or sample or beat is
triggered, it’s immediately jerked backward at the speed of light, disappearing
into the singularity’s sheer gravity. Even when it seems like some tones are
about to escape and shoot off like sentient aurora borealises and cause
whatever mischief they’re capable of causing, that black hole – Ol’ Sucky, as
our primitive ancestors used to call it – reels them back until they’re no
longer perceivable beyond the event horizon.
So when you drop something like Nonlinear
Record upon an unsuspecting species, one that cannot begin to fathom time
as something other than, duh, linear,
you might run into some problems if you’re expecting an immediate reaction or a
rapid evolutionary advance. People just aren’t built in ways to process
something as obviously next-level as Genetics and Windsurfing. When confronted
by the sun rising and taking up three-quarters of the sky as it did so in the
novel Dhalgren, the citizens of
Bellona reacted in ways that only people divorced completely from the concept
of that physical phenomenon could: they wept unceasingly, they wandered about
confused, they stared into the sky and waited to die, and, spoiler alert,
nothing happened. The sun eventually set, just another fucked-up thing that
happened in the fictional city.
That’s why it’s important to rejigger your headspace when tackling
forward-thinking sonic architecture. Yeah, you could dive in and overwhelm
yourself, but wouldn’t you rather prepare for the onslaught of bytes and
waveforms that hurtle at you from alien sources? Or maybe, since we’re talking
black holes and Nonlinear Record and
all, time has simply ceased to function as expected, and Daniel Jasniewski has
indeed evolved into Genetics and Windsurfing, and what we’re catching are brief
glimpses of future-Daniel as the space-time continuum continues its
disintegration in our vicinity. That’s… yeah, that one’s actually a bit more
plausible, I think. This is future music, the result of biotechnological
breakthroughs. Prepare yourself – it doesn’t get any less weird as we go.
--Ryan Masteller
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