MICROCORPS, the new project of Alex Tucker, lurches us forward into a near-future dystopia part-flesh, part-microprocessor, and achieves eerie beauty; as you can hear below with the second track to be revealed from next week’s XMIT album, “UVU”, the steel grey visuals for which you can see below.
The album takes us out deep and dark into a world in which Alex shares his journey with Gazelle Twin, Nik Void, Simon Fisher Turner and Astrud Steehouder. Alex’s constantly metamorphosing soundworld herein centres around processed electronic systems, altered voices, sound synthesis and fractured beats, becoming humanoid rather than strictly human.
He explains, “I wanted to make something that reflected the cold realm of the current MICROCORPS world, using black and white digital landscapes alongside footage I shot in Walthamstow Wetlands Nature Reserve.
“In the film I created these liminal transitions between the synthetic and human to reflect the track’s use of machine-led systems and processed acoustic instruments.”
We’re told that each track is born from a balance between composition and improvisation within set parameters. At each stage audio is heavily processed and then reconfigured; the alien, alienated soundscapes are created by setting up systems that are non-repeatable, in which sonic compositional decisions can be premeditated and intuitive, but never the same with each performance; using hardware and instruments outside of the computer to make live stereo takes that have limited room for editing and mixing.
Alex continues: “I’d been looking into combining dream music with machine rhythms, but there are so many great examples out there of both music forms, so I started to cut up the drones and really filter the drum patterns to create a hybrid space.”
The album’s artwork features manipulated ink drawings by Tucker taken from his recent comic ENTITY REUNION 2.
And that title? XMIT refers to a time in which information, both physical and nonphysical, transfers at an alarming rate – and one beyond human comprehension. A world that’s either very close – or already upon us.
MICROCORPS’ XMIT will be released by Alter on April 16th; you can place your pre-orders at Bandcamp, here.
Follow Alex Tucker on Twitter, Instagram and Bandcamp.
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