“Charismatic contemporary bard” (NY Times) Elliot Cole continues his pursuit of “music of endless discovery” (A Closer Listen) with his new audiovisual diptych The World Is Nothing.
This World is more like a black hole: over a thousand samples compressed into a concise 11-minute statement, a multiverse of moods and textures, synthetic and organic. Elliot describes his process:
I wrote a piece of software called the Flood. With it I connect to the Freesound.org API – basically a wikipedia of sound from around the world – and download a stream of (Creative Commons-licensed) sounds continuously.
You set the rate you want to flood you with sound – say 50 new sounds a minute – and give it some search constraints. For example: bellssounds whose mean pitch is middle Csounds that are close to 50% noiserandom sounds that are similar to each othersounds that are exactly 0.2 seconds longsounds from above the Arctic Circle.
These sounds flood in and just keep coming, spinning in cycles and rhythms, and sometimes a wild strand of something like music emerges.
Creating The World Is Nothing was a process of exploring, collecting, and weaving these strands together.
Cole also created an animated, audioreactive film for the music. Prisms, meshes, and geometries develop the music’s themes of multiplicity, flood, and void into an icon for contemplation or psychedelic mesmerism.