James Ginzburg - Six Correlations (2018)

Restless sound explorer James Ginzburg (Emptyset) commits his definitive solo opus with debut LP ‘Six Correlations’, an immersive trench of dense harmonic expression consolidating influences ranging from Gaelic folk music to Iranian and Indian classical styles and generative composition techniques.

Originally composed for a commissioned performance in Berlin and recorded in early 2018 over three days, ’Six Correlations’ considers the relationship between the organic and the digital world as a meditation on whether modernity implicitly represents a long slow goodbye to nature: to everything that is not integrated into the networked world.

Rather than a eulogy to the Anthropocene, Ginzburg renders an optimistic, imaginative solution to the disappearance of nature and non-digital culture, seeking out new, harmonious relationships between organic instruments and technological process. Using a hand drum, piano, voice, shruti box and Roland SH-101, he beautifully puts that idea into practice on 6 tracks that short circuit and play around with conceptions of consonance as organic bliss and dissonant noise as chaotic malevolence.

Between the undulating box drone of ‘Light, Timed - A River’, and the swelling gust of bagpipes in ‘Above Water, Inside’ he locates and conveys a mercurial, bittersweet soul at the biting point where consonance and dissonance dissolve into pure sensation, conjuring a harmony of feelings that transcends time, space, light and sound with the lushest yet, crucially, humble and broad appeal.