N E Trethowan is here with Biofilm (SOUNDS AGAINST HUMANITY SAH042), released under his Net guise, and it’s a much more process-driven and micro-digital-sampling exercise than his previous efforts heard by us. Indeed many of the 14 tracks here are quite short episodes, taking their turn on the stage (a stage which is only about three neutrinos wide and coated thickly with gluons) before they vanish into the ethereal particle-verse.
In the envelope from Tampere (where he resides), Trethowan includes a short descriptive note about his processes and methods which I don’t think is reproduced anywhere on the web. I mention it as it’s fairly baffling to me, as it’s hard to visualise what tools he’s working with; I think Biofilm involves samples, but beyond that I confess I’m lost when he discourses on ‘sample scrubs’ and ‘autonomous patches’, which may or not refer to aspects of modular synthesis and computer sound editing. He speaks not of anything so direct as “playing” a recording, rather of scanning audio extremely slowly and making use of a delay chip, a component which he seems to have over-clocked to the point of no return; to put it plainly, sounds and signals have become severely distressed and degraded, and it might be that the resulting artefacts are exactly what Net craves for this exercise.
In his mind however, we’re already way beyond the mechanics of the computer and the makeup of a digital file, and his transcendent aesthetic is hearing the entire contents of Biofilm as some sort of field recordings, and to that end he even provides a handy list of the teeming watery details he has fetched back from the brooks of Finland near his home. Even the track titles, with their made-up words such as ‘Settle Monosquelch’, contribute to this plan, as if he were proposing an alternative take on micro-organisms in nature. Perhaps it’s quite legitimate to regard Biofilm as an artist’s rendition of nature, just as surely as a Turner painting is a rendition of weather; he’s using the tiniest particles of processed sound he can manufacture in order to express his vision of the microbes and plant life that thrive in his pools of grubby brown water. Trethowan’s achievement has been to arrive at a wholly convincing “organic” sound through purely digital means.
I might add that this whole release is a very successful example of sublimation, and empathically not a set of anonymous born-digital splinters insisting on their own process, such as we might find from others who have delved into similar areas. On the contrary, it’s very human music, filled with a strange species of life, and highly original to boot. From 24 February 2022.