David Curington
Composer Reacts / After these Messages
CD / Seed Mark / Print / DL
David is a sound and visual artist based in Hadfield, UK with interests in density, texture, noise, waste, commercialism, collage, the everyday, the absurd and their manifestations in the internet age. He is the founder of Square Ears records and, to date, his music has been released on both his own label, Difficult Art and Music, Anticipating Nowhere, Hard Return, Steep Gloss and Human Geography Recordings and aired on Freeness on BBC Radio 3. As an improviser, he is interested in reconceptualising the oboe as a noise instrument and has performed both at Square Ears label nights and the Curious Ear series in Manchester.
David holds a PhD in composition from the Royal Northern College of Music and is a former winner of the RPS Composition Prize.
Composer REACTS / After These Messages brings together two new works by composer and sound-artist David Curington, both exploring glitching, fractured textures in response to the sensory overload of our digital world. At once scathing and ironic, the album offers an uncomfortable glimpse into the hyper-mediated nature of our contemporary lives: its sounds competing and deteriorating, obnoxious and puerile, all car alarms and rough collage, sampled classical motifs fighting against snatches of text shorn of whatever sense they may once have contained.
Composer REACTS started life as an artistic response to the (now old-fashioned) idea of a manifesto, and what form 21st century manifesti might take as polemical reactions to current social, economic and/or environmental issues. Numerous movements were hypothesised, complete with their imagined manifesti, and six survived as productive starting points for the process of searching for audio and graphic samples to generate music and artwork.
After These Messages uses samples and tropes derived from TV and social media advertising to create tracks lying somewhere between composition, improvisation and non-functional marketing that would be of no use to any corporation, ever.
Prerequisites to successful marketing campaigns commonly include:
1. Having a product to sell;
2. Clear and precise messaging;
3. Not making your potential customers listen to the sound of someone using the toilet
for 8 minutes;
4. Not burning the customer’s face.
After These Messages meets none of these requirements.
Production, mixing and artwork by David Curington.
Mastered by Taylor Deupree at 12k.
The album is released in a limited edition box set, including a plantable seed bookmark / DL code, CD, Print/Poster, and booklet.
FFO: The Caretaker, Alva Noto, Arthur Lispett.