Hey, I get it – you coat your circuits in
breadcrumbs, plug them in, and drop them in a deep fryer, and this is what you
get. Headfooter, the combination of melting
electronics and the pops made while they’re melting in the deep fryer, is a cry
for help from the synthetic world, a sputtering, cascading, milky goo emanating
from the mouth of a disintegrating android. Matthew Gallagher – not the
watermelon one – harnesses the subtleties of these imaginaries and abstracts
them, layering them against each other and applying rhythm to the antirhythm,
creating in the process a glimmering, shuffling, reanimated corpse of digital
parts constructed (probably) from all the horrifying sounds a disintegrating
android makes. (But making them sound not so horrifying in the end.)
Machine Listener: navigating the depths of the
digital psyche, scouring the nooks and crannies of nodes and motherboards to
gain even the faintest glimpse, the most fleeting synapse of unprogrammed human
response. I wonder how far Gallagher (again, no watermelons) has gotten in their research, tinkering as they do in lab coat and goggles and periodically publishing
their findings (such as Headfooter) to
an audience mostly disinterested in the tech, in the philosophy, instead
hanging on to the dank Warp-ified impulses and blankets of synthesizer. That audience isn't getting it though! Get under the hood, fiddle with the knobs and plugs. Get
a microscope and use it for Pete’s
sake. There’s gotta be something under here that points to machines and humans
interacting on some identical level. There’s just gotta be!
Till we figure it out, the Machine Listener
continues to work.
https://unifactor.bandcamp.com/
--Ryan