John Christian is one of the three founding members of UK's Airsculpture. One of the finest EM trio's in this day and age of Electronic Music. With Airsculpture they made awesome great music and gave many live performances in the last 25 years (the formed in 1995!)
As a solo artist, John's music inevitably has a lot in common with his work with AirSculpture but presents more composed, structured soundscapes. Many tracks have layers of sequences that mesh in a complex fashion that is hard to achieve within the improvised band framework.
John about the music.For a long time, I've been exploring electronic music, learning through trial and error. My biggest conclusion in this time is that the defining principle of EM is timbre. If the sounds used aren't amongst the most important elements of a piece, then it's not electronic music, it's music that just happens to be created with electronic instruments.
Gils Gils is very much in line with this philosophy. I began setting up sounds on my Eurorack modular recording as I went. Over time I added more voices, refined what I had, and practiced playing them - recording all the time. Superficially it's just a simple sequencer album - the origional idea was to have no keyboard parts just abstract sounds and rhythms - but the timbral focus is key, with sound parameters continually changing by manual tweaks and modulation.
The three tracks are taken from five of the best takes from these recordings. After living with them for a while I decided they needed some keyboard parts as well, so for two of the tracks I spent some time recording overdubs. The interplay between the mechanical pulse of the sequencer and the imperfect human element is another of my touchstones and it adds an element of life to them. The title track is unadulterated, leaving its interesting quantised pitch sweeps in the foreground.
As well as developing the music I was working on a video setup with the intention of being able to livestream. This hasn't yet worked out well enough to use live but there is a video recording of the first section of Russel's teapot - just the sequencer parts.
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