'Daesin' is a split tape release on HyperChaos records with Banshee Vault Asylum's 'Ganser Mule'.

Lawrence English (Room 40) was kind enough to write a review of the release.

Banshee Vault Asylum
bansheevaultasylum.bandcamp.com

Hyperchas Records
hyperchaos.bandcamp.com
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PROPORTIONS OF THE EDIT
By Lawrence English

It’s difficult to conceive of a contemporary acoustic culture that has not been touched by the presence of the sample. Samples, sections of audio extracted from various forms of media – music, film, radio, and the like – have become a staple tool through which artists are able to recontextualise and redefine potential relationships between pre-existing forms. Whilst rooted in a distinct and temporal history, a sample is essentially a building block toward a potential future, albeit ripped from the past. It exists then as a seed that, upon germination, promises to propagate in new ways, at different times and in as yet unknowable places.

Over the past seven decades or so, this form of cultural redistribution has multiplied and mutated its way across almost all facets of sound culture. Whether it be the earliest examples found in Music Concrète, where tape splices of the everyday were transformed for the purposes of creating acousmatic music or, hip hop’s use of various materials as a means of making intergenerational connects between successive musical movements and styles, samples have been a critical device for unlocking new readings of familiar materials.

The sample however is only part of the story. To understand the true potential of a sample we must travel to its edges, to the points from which it was pulled beyond its original context. It is arguably in the edit that the fullness of the sample can be understood. Those choices made by the composer/artist bring with them a creativity, intentional or not, that allows an imagined potential for what might become of the building block which is the liberated audio fragment.

Brion Gysin and William Burroughs knew of the power of the edit as a means for creating ruptures in time and place. Their cut-up experiments brought with them a critical understanding of what might be, rather than what is. It’s the edit that actualises the potential for the sample; this actualisation is part of the creativity Jean-Luc Goddard spoke to when he remarked ‘It’s not where you take it from, it’s where you take it to”.

It’s here, in recognising the potential of the sample, actualised through the edit, that the work of Orthotyp-a (aka Paul Young) comes into focus. Over the past half-decade or so, Orthotyp-a has sought to commence his pieces from a singular starting point; often a piece of found sound, a sample at its most basic and uncomplicated. His choices in editing that sampled material is what sets his music apart.

Working to simultaneously expand (compositionally) and contract (conceptually), his compositions often collide intensely complex rhythmic motions or harmonic sequences against disarmingly modest sample sources. Ten Shades Of Martin, which draws on sampled materials from Dr Rick Rhoderick’s lecture ‘The Rejection Of Humanism’, examining Heidegger’s contribution to existential ideals and the self, is a dynamic piece that counterpoints macro-processes against micro-shifts. The result is an arpeggiation and sequence of multiple elements folding into and onto one another in a synchronised acoustic tapestry.

By way of contrast Little Female Bear Pt. 1 & Pt. 2 involves a more complete transformative action, one based entirely on tempo. Taking moments of "Spiritui Sancto: Responsory at First Vespers for St. Ursula and the 11,000 Virgin-Martyrs of Cologne (D 167r, R 471v) by Hildegard of Bingen", Orthotyp-a blurs rhythm with the piece’s tempo starting out at 999BPM. At this speed, individuated sounds merge into tone-like clouds. Across the two sections of the composition he gradually reduces the frenetic speed of the piece, but this does not diminish the concentrated chaotic sensibility. Using techniques developed through his years as an improvisor, Orthotyp-a brings a set of anarchistic methods to bear that generate an unsettled but directed trajectory, one that charts a sample’s degraded orbit. His sample’s eventual evisceration is a reminder of the temporality that surrounds all sound, the moment we hold it in our mind’s ear, it has already passed beyond the material world to find its rest in the shallow grave of our memory.