The I-Ching is something i've sporadically used over the course of my life and i wanted to integrate a symbolic gesture of it into a track within the confines of measured randomness. I noticed that in my working Sooterkin drive I have 32 folders of material. I randomly chose 2 sound bytes from each folder and extracted a 4 second piece from each. Once I had 64 numbered 4 second bytes, I shuffled a deck of old I-Ching cards, and laid them out in their final random order, and consequently assembled the numbered bytes in the same order as the cards. Of course; 64 x 4 = 256, requiring 17 further seconds. After much reflection, i placed .5 of a second of silence before the 30 second mark and another .5 of a second of silence before the 2 minute and 53 mark, in acknowledgement of the differentiation and starting points of the three movements by John Cage. I then looped the last second of the final byte concurrently into .047 of a second smaller increments, until 4:33 had been reached. I had previously noticed that out of the random sequence generated by my shuffling, oddly enough card 47 was in the 47th place, (the only card in it's correct place) and thus by definition became important. The number of oppression. I should mention that I've done the entire exercise by sight only, i.e.; looking at the files on the computer and cutting and pasting without listening to any of them, therefore having no idea of the sounds and it's structures
This collection of singles from ambient/drone artist Michel Banabila features collaborations with Bill Laswell, Salar Asid, and more. Bandcamp New & Notable Aug 16, 2022