John Wall

Delighted to welcome this rare live performance by John Wall, an essential electronic music artist whose work has spanned the course of 4 decades. Ever since obtaining a Casio FZ-1 – a mono sampler synthesizer – in the late 80s his music has been on an ever changing and evolving journey, moving from early plunderphonics work into micro-detailed and sonically radical computer-based composition.

“In a most general sense, variation is the lifeblood of all music, digital or not—but the substance of that variation often consists of tangible, codifiable surface-level traits or characteristics: chords, notes, rhythms, gestures are chained, cycled, forming the music’s spinal column in their act of becoming. Here, instead, we find variations in extreme abstraction: no two gestures or stretches are identical, yet each builds upon and obscures, even anonymizes, the last, transforming our position on a fixed timeline into a place on an open field. As a result, the listening process becomes that of a limitless struggle between familiarity and uncertainty, the new and the old: each gesture bears traces of the past—its past—while making us question that past’s very existence; the future, once fixed, becomes unstuck, dislodged, at once overflowing with potential and foreclosed, predetermined. Some patterns do emerge: we dizzily shift between specific frequency bands, the rhythmic material shedding and donning coatings that here pierce and there thunder. But certainty constantly slips out of our grasp; there is no legible process or series of known technical steps with which we can comfortably situate ourselves. Through this teetering—ultimately only achievable by painstaking editing and culling—the flux of knowledge makes itself felt: what is legible passes into opacity and vice versa, just as the singular outpost or foothold—that chordal burst—toggles between two states with unpredictable velocity. The result is unambiguous: a disalienation of computerized sound; the rush of possibility.” – Sunik Kim on John Wall’s work