|
photo credit: Lutz Diehl
Story: Ralph Greco, Jr.
Nick Didkovsky (Vomit Fist, Doctor Nerve, Fred Frith Guitar Quartet) is proud to announce the release an album of new music for electric guitar. Profane Riddles includes nine tracks of intricately embroidered electric guitar music that rewards deep listening. The CD includes a 12 page booklet of finely detailed artwork which comes to life in a visualization video.
Nick Didkovsky shares “Most of Profane Riddles is taken from one recording session. I followed a straightforward improvised composition path: beginning each piece with one pass of improvised guitar, then coming up with complimentary material to create additional interlocking layers. I kept things moving along, just letting my ears guide me and not interrupting the flow. I believe the intricately embroidered music on Profane Riddles will reward deep and careful listening, and I hope people can carve out 31 minutes of uninterrupted time so they can float away with it.
Artist Y.I.H.H. is a fiercely private person who requested that his attribution be limited to these four letters. His intensely detailed drawings caught my attention a few years ago. I wanted them to be represented on Profane Riddles because there was something resonant and familiar about the obsessive micro-details in his work. The size of a CD couldn’t properly highlight the hundreds of tiny glyphs, curves, and shapes in his drawings, so I took some inspiration from Peter Schmidt’s art for Brian Eno’s ‘Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy’. I wrote software that selected square details from Y.I.H.H.’s illustration, scaled them to various sizes, and laid them out in a concentric configuration inspired by Schmidt. This way I could emphasize microscopic features through magnification and repetition. The program generated so many beautiful possibilities, I couldn’t choose just one for the album cover, and opted instead to publish the 12 page booklet which is included in the CD. As for the video, my software sometimes gradually shifted the images in a row, reminding me of a film strip. This inspired me to want to see the artwork animated. So after finishing the album art I modified my software to generate sequences of images that I could animate like a flip book, with the layers of tiles crawling across the design. I edited these sequences together in a sort of abstract narrative, and ended up with what I think is a pretty mesmerizing and trippy four minute visualization.”
Watch here:
|
