Richard Scott — Delirious Cartographies

I want some of what Richard Scott is smoking. His latest release, Delirious Cartographies, is one of the weirdest and wildest things I’ve heard in many months (and that’s saying something). Improvised electronics. Does that really mean anything? I’m not sure, because the electronic part of that genre moniker is something much more, and much less, than improvised. 

At best, pioneers like Scott are bending their signals, not creating them, and those polymathic synth nerds that pollute the waters are often unable to accept this basic fact. Not Scott, at least not here. At best, one improvises with the tonality and infinitesimal granular possibility of the already given, moving within its spectrum of discernible movements, squatting in its real estate of frequency shifts. What Scott has managed in nearly four years of acoustic research and production is the denial of anything that might resemble synthesis – no narrative, no story, and thankfully, no happy resolution. The delirium in the album’s title offers some clues: the manipulation and control over a set of input and output signals turned against itself, and rightly so. Delirium as a loss of orientation, no centre, nothing to anchor a listener to predictable content and its reproduction. In societies of control, delirium might be our saving grace.

Many of us tend to take synthesis for granted, or at least we do when we call those analogue signal-producing devices “synthesizers”. Learn the master’s language, the language of power, the oppressor, so that you can effectively speak back to it. These are words to live by, or rally a modest revolution or two, and Scott has managed in his extensive familiarity with his chosen devices, to deconstruct the very structures that undergird an electronic signaling mechanism. There is no stasis, and the variety of source material – field recordings, live and improvised sessions, and the unruly pulsations of an EMS Synthi A, among others – never disrupts the core, which is no core, strictly speaking; it is the act of synthesizing laid bare, like a good Cubist collage, or a welded steel sculpture that shows off its joints like the red dots of a junkie’s arm.

To render such an experiment in colloquial terms would miss the point, I’m afraid. And I can’t venture to guess to whom such a project is devoted or directed, and I wouldn’t want to. Save for a few common terms, I can only point, rather feebly, to what this crazy work did to me, and experience counts for very little, and maybe that’s a good thing. Delirious? Yes, but so are all pictures of the world that are not mere reversals of it. It is the synthesized world as it already is, only more so. To check it out for yourself