Softman - 500ms (2018)

500ms is primarily a set of beautiful ambient music that meets at the intersection of the dreamlike and the meditative. Notably, and importantly for its creator, it is also a collaborative process between him and machines.

Softman created a patch in Max/MSP a visual programming language specialised for music and multimedia art, and from there, he fed it the core elements of the music, having already created a set environment for the music and then asking the patch to interpret those parameters and send out the results in real time. From there, the music could be altered and adjusted instantaneously, bent to the artist’s preferences

The sounds on 500ms were sourced from old records, compiled and fed through into the newly-created Softman world, the results entirely different and new. “I like this sonic palette I work with, Softman reasons, but I wanted to know ‘can I make the process more exciting, how can I take out the slow bits of arranging, the boring bits, which is sitting there for hours at a time?’”

“The track listings avoids implying anything or to artificially making you feel something - just face value. It’s not meant to be about anything,”

And yet, inevitably there is meaning attached to everything. And this record is about distilling the essence of the artist into its purest form. It’s a beautiful and compelling thing.