What is Sick Signal?
Sick Signal is about context, lots of it, all overlapping and mixing in confusing excessive ways. In that sense it is the opposite of what I do with Bitter Harvest or Babylon Rising where I try to keep the concept clear by keeping it simple and stylistically pure.
Sick Signal is the musical equivalent of the experimental process of overlapping films – where an interesting new context can evolve unpredictably out of the collision of other contexts.
Sick Signal is similar to Babylon Rising in that it’s a live project where I create music through improvisation. I’m not trying to re-create pre-recorded songs.
However the sound of Sick Signal is different from Babylon Rising in that almost anything goes. Both Babylon Rising and Bitter Harvest are mostly defined by rigid boundaries. Sick Signal is can be anything ranging from noisy ambient to heavy analog beats in strange time signatures over top of looped movie quotes.
Some Sick Signal recordings are slow evolving soundscapes influenced by artists such as Morton Feldman, while other recordings have a more techno feel to them influenced by Aphex Twin. Sometimes it’s cut ups that reveal my love of Negativeland or The Tape Beatles.
I have lots of dictaphone recordings of me retelling dreams I had, or describing events that happened to me. Weaving all that type of text into a mix with news items or other things that interest me creates music that in a strange psychedelic way, reveals something of who I am.