Psiloscope is a musical outgrowth from the inspirational frottage of random sonic debris.
Frottage, in both senses - patterns from the clouds and the sublimated excitement of rubbing against strangers in the dark.
Only the strangers we rub up against reside inside the same skull. Yes, that's right, we're dealing with imaginary friends here. Well, we do like to dignify the process a little and call it
Shadow work. We see Shadow figures, persona splinters, aliens and
archetypes in our creations. They show up in the random sonic debris demanding expression. Wailing, grunting creatures, sometimes stillborn, sometimes alive, farting their visceral message in a fog of meaning. How can we not coax these critters out? It's either this or they will out themselves in all their retarded glory in other unwanted ways.
Our best delivery tool was given to us by Salvador Dali: that is the
Paranoiac Critical Method as adapted to sound and music creation. We add our own twist by using the Tarot Cards
You need some kind of evocative sonic frottage to get critically paranoid with so that's where our "randomising" compositional tool, the Tarot deck, comes into play. The Sonic Tarot deck is a collection of personally meaningful samples and loops mapped against the transpersonal archetypes of the Tarot deck. The
Major Arcana cards are seen as representations of Jungian archetypes. Our sound collection has been intuitively filed into folders corresponding to each Major Arcana card in the Tarot deck.
The fun starts when you draw cards from a tarot deck with a personally significant question in mind. After drawing cards just from the Major Arcana, we use the corresponding sounds in a composition. Whatever arises will shine through with personal meaning. Getting playfully paranoid is an easy step from there (the cards are speaking to me!) and the compositions will often suggest themselves. Aesthetic judgements play their part after that and hopefully it all comes together.
For any given tarot card there may be many samples to choose from in our collection but each will have a similar feeling tone or archetypal signature that we've discerned in our feverish little imaginations. Sometimes we'll let the cards decide which sounds belong to them. After collecting or creating a sound we'll draw a card and file the sound accordingly. The sounds themselves have been appropriated and created from many random sources ranging from field recordings to electronic jiggery buggery.
If this approach interests you, you can save yourself some time creating the folder structure that we use to store our sampled sound collection in. Download this
zipped archive and you'll get the folder structure. Each folder contains an image file of the corresponding tarot card. If you want you can use these to put images on your folders (zip archives don't preserve the image associations - I tried!). We'd love to hear from people who use similar methods or are trying this one. And remember, it's all good fun until someone loses an I...
more recordings are freely available from our website
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Nepal H. Rasputin,
Ambiguity Q. Nefariousness,
Conundrum D. Petri,
Gridlocked V. Parade,
