In 2018, Anne Haaning asked Isambard Khroustaliov to write a soundtrack for her film and installation ‘Tangible Extractions’. Created exclusively using a modular synthesizer and by hacking presets on a Roland D-05 module, the soundtrack ended up being the catalyst for a new direction in his music, one that is expanded on and explored in the album ‘This Is My Private Beach, This Is My Jetsam’ from 2019.
For the forthcoming album ‘Transhuman Harmolodics’, Khroustaliov re-visits the soundtrack, taking another look at it’s nascent forms and sonorities with the hindsight of having developed numerous new strategies and methods of composing with this type of material. The result is the track ‘Longevity Escape Velocity’ that concludes the album, which takes the seed of the soundtrack to ‘Tangible Extractions’ and launches it into a harmonic vortex of suspended animation. It’s trajectory as a composition is completed by feeding the soundtrack’s audio and the MIDI sequences used to make it, along with a flood of NRPN continuous controller information to a Moog One with the aim of having it try to copy it. The end of the piece acts like a strangely distorted mirror, a kind of AI recapitulation of the spark of inspiration that initiated a journey of musical discovery.
‘Transhuman Harmolodics’ arrives in full on the 28th May 2021.