spectropol records

A fascinating collection of de/re-constructed experimental pop tracks from Marcus Rubio.

SpecT 30 – I don’t think I see a difference

Rubio:
“Last year, I became fascinated with the acoustic possibilities of the banjo in conjunction with various electronics and pedals and created a number of works that utilized these alien sounds while still warping them into folk songs of sorts. However, as I delved further into the instrument’s extended technique, I realized that there were ways to create a kind of polyphony with just the acoustics of the instrument itself and set off working on many of the pieces heard here. With these particular songs, I wanted to both play with the instrumental specificity of the banjo but also try to reduce those sounds and the formal elements of pop songs to their most basic elements. These pieces are equally indebted to the work of reductionist composers/improvisers like Tetuzi Akiyama and Taku Sugimoto as they are to the folk music of Washington Phillips and Abner Jay. As such, most of these works were built off of the raw banjo/voice material and feature minimal overdubs save for some vocal harmonies and organ on a few tracks. The banjo material on the album (tracks 1-5) is very concerned with how much of a song/sound you can remove yet still have it resemble that thing and the remaining two pieces are further non-banjo explorations of this idea. “the war on christmas” places a cynical pop song into a minimalist/modular situation notationally while the bagatelles take extremely small melodic song fragments and spreads them out very quietly over an extended period of time.”

http://marcusrubio.com/