Blackest Ever Black, by Haswell & Hecker (Double LP on WCJ)

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OVERVIEW: The most cutting edge music you’ll hear this year! Following a period of study at the Xenakis Institute of Research on Music and Acoustics in Paris, Russell Haswell and Florian Hecker have produced an album using Xenakis's UPIC system – a computer programme which interprets lines and shapes into music. The duo worked with the unique Electroacoustic UPIC system that implements a graphic approach to sound synthesis; one literally draws the sound. Haswell and Hecker recognised the UPIC as an instrument of metamorphosis, turning imagery into sound. First, they fed the UPIC with images of our time: erotica, food pornography (images of French desserts), a geodesic dome, a double helix, a microscopic portrait of the blackest ever black, the Madrid train bombing and a mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb. Next, they furnished the UPIC with their own drawings: dense patterns of hundreds of arcs in the manner of Sol LeWitt’s conceptual drawings. Pushing further: "We applied the Surrealist technique of real-time automatic drawing" - Hecker. Distilled out of nine hours of original material, Blackest Ever Black is, in Haswell’s description: "A large four panel polyptych, consisting of slices of a succession of images that could assist the experience of synaesthesia". Haswell and Hecker derived the title Blackest Ever Black from a scientific paper on the "blackest black ever made on Earth", an ultrablack coating that can be painted onto optical instruments to absorb essentially all the light that hits them. ‘Blackest Ever Black’ pushes the boundaries of contemporary classical music, while never losing sight of the tradition they are working within. Using the unique UPIC system of sound synthesis conceived by legendary Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, Haswell & Hecker create their sound-world using visual images - an electronic pen is used on a drawing tablet and the lines are directly translated into sound. Dan Fox, writing in frieze of his experience of hearing Haswell & Hecker live, said, 'I heard the sound of the blackest ever black and listened to the shape of leaves... [they] explore deeply human questions of how our senses apprehend and interpret the world'.

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