Description
In Intricate Connections Formed Without Touch, Adam Basanta explores a timbral and stylistic spectrum emerging from a single acoustic guitar improvisation. Cut, sliced, re-arranged and folded-over, Basanta creates the vast majority of timbral material heard through a series of laptop improvisations. The guitar is de- and re-constructed through the use of short sonic fragments: at times retaining familiar plucked and resonant timbres, while at others sliced so short that the result seems entirely synthetic. While the original sound source arises from a tactile encounter, this careful re-arrangement of fragments within a digital realm is alluded to in the album’s title.
With the original source oscillating between recognizable and otherworldly, Intricate Connections Formed Without Touch forms a synthesis of sonic, harmonic, and rhythmic approaches which hybridize experimental and popular influences.
The materials were assembled into six tracks first in an artist residency at EMS Stockholm / Sweden (2014) and later at the artist’s studio in Montreal / Canada (2015 – 2017). The album is complimented by a commissioned remix of Flora & Fauna by Vancouver-based drummer and electronic music producer Kai Basanta.
Preview
Video
Reviews
“La musicalité et les harmonies extraites des prises et retravaillées de manière quasi scientifique, forment un tout pris entre abstraction moléculaire et poésie réaliste, inconnu et matérialité surgis d’un espace en suspension, constituant une electronica sensible aux oscillations penchées sur un précipice enrobé de lumières floutées. Un opus tout en délicatesse. Très fortement recommandé.”
Silence And Sound
“Basanta here is more interested in the ambient qualities of the sound.”
Vital Weekly
“On Intricate Connections Formed Without Touch Montréal-based musician Adam Basanta takes a recording of a single acoustic guitar improvisation and re-contextualises it by chopping it up and rebuilding it – at times we hear tiny snippets glitched into Ryoji Ikeda-like rhythmic buzzing, while at other times the sample length increases and we hear the jangly qualities of the acoustic guitar, granulated into lovely filigree constructions.”
FBI Radio / Utility Fog