Clip from “Drowned In Meaning” album appropriates Bowie,
Boosh and “Big Blue Marble.”
James Towning of Realistic. Photo by Belly.
“Token Gestures” is the first single & video from the
upcoming new album “Drowned In Meaning” by Realistic.
“Towning demonstrates a knack for unconventional looping,
sonic accumulation, and a good joke.” – All Music Guide
Following up previous releases for the Illegal Art (Girl
Talk) and Seeland Records (Negativland) labels
among others, Brooklyn-based electronic collage artist James Towning will
release his latest album as Realistic this week on February
29th.
Drowned In Meaning’s first single is “Token
Gestures” where the Hall & Oates hit “Kiss
On My List”, vintage tape of the Mars rover lift off sequence, the sound of
a fireworks display that Towning recorded in Brooklyn Heights,
and a few dozen additional pieces of audio combine to form a track that sounds
strange, familiar and strangely familiar.
The video for the song is now streaming. Towning says
that the clip “is an exploration of multi-layered compositing techniques
similar to how the music is created. Snippets of video fromDavid Bowie, The
Mighty Boosh, and ‘The Big Blue Marble’ are synchronized
with the original samples and combined with stock footage of people pretending
to feel emotion.”
Drowned In Meaning (the album title is
intentionally sarcastic) features 16 tracks comprised of hundreds of samples --
some obvious, some obviously obscure -- stitched and layered withTowning’s
own synthesizers, drum machines, digital effects, and keen sense of humor.
“More often than not, I’m drawn to using samples that strike
a personal or nostalgic chord,” Towning explains. “I might use
two bars from a favorite Cabaret Voltaire track, a snippet
from a TV series, or environmental sounds recorded around my neighborhood.
Every track has undiscovered conceptual references or an abstract story that I
can tell with a new sound that I have on hand.”
Drowned In Meaning, the latest album by Realistic is
set for release on the artist’s own Blackmail Electronics label
on February 29th, 2012.
Realistic
Drowned In Meaning
(Blackmail Electronics – Feb. 29th, 2012)
Request: FULL
LP
Track Listing:
01. Math is Hard
02. Cuddle Party Headrush
03. Notes to Self
05. Drama Distortion
06. Dot Pattern
07. Glitter and Glue
08. Moment of Realisation
09. One Hundred Years
10. Woozy Familiarity
11. Pointless Creative Endeavor
12. The Sea of Showers
13. Good Luck With All That
14. Mining for Content
15. Pursuit of Happiness
16. Late Nights and Weekends
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