Ian Boddy - Tone Science (2016)

Ian Boddy, DiN label boss, is one of the best known names in UK electronic music. He has been releasing music for over 35 years as well as playing concerts, creating sound design and composing library music. Yet despite this long musical career he still manages to surprise his listeners and Tone Science could represent his most experimental album to date. For this release Boddy has returned to his musical roots where experimentation was the name of the game.

He has always been fascinated by the random qualities of natural phenomena such as streams, waves, the leaves on a tree or the clouds in the sky. Whilst they seem, on the one hand to always be the same, they are in fact constantly changing and their patterns never exactly repeat. With this thought in mind he set about creating soundscapes using controlled random systems that could self generate themselves using his analogue modular gear. The pitches of the notes in each piece were massaged into various musical scales by the use of note quantisers giving each of the tracks a distinct harmonic voice. The composition process was the creation of the patch itself and in fact he didn’t physically play anything at all at the recording stage. What you hear on these five pieces is the result of these complex interactions. Like the natural phenomena he describes above they appear to stay the same yet they never repeat and each has a distinct mood. By restricting his audio palette on this project to only his analogue modular instruments including vintage FX the pieces have a very pure, electronic nature.

With “Tone Science” Boddy proves once again that he never rests in his personal musical journey. There are always new sonic territories to explore and for the adventurous listener this album opens up a whole new world of electronica to enjoy.