Mesmeon

Our final New Blood winner is Mesmeon, a.k.a DJ Mesm or Pulsar Wg’lett, a New Mexico, USA, musician and visual artist whose real name is Shane LaPierre. Mesmeon is a child of the digital world and its art – he creates collages out of abstract computer music and pieces of digital synthesis mainly based on morphological grounds. This is perhaps why it is no surprise that his artworks, whether mixes or images, deal with the audio/visual synaesthesia of machines: taking aural or visual patterns and using digital processes to transform the incoming audio signal into visual or vice-versa. The interest lies in the interplay within the overlapping territories between these two worlds as well as the esoteric aspects of this interplay – testing the imagination of machines. Mesmeon’s works are full of sounds that will fill even the most progressive of Luddites with anxiety, but anyone who is a fan of the digital mind should tune in and be fascinated!

STM 179 is a homage to the digital age and its sounds, noises and their startling diversity. It is extreme computer-generated music, which bursts, explodes in all its digital beauty. The selection revolves around Florian Hecker’s legendary label Falsch, which paved the way for the vast landscapes of imagination for explorations of computer-music. It is a continuous journey through glitch land populated by bleeps and hisses with occasional broken and distorted pulsating beats. The mix spans across a wide range of digital sound artists from Gordon Krieger and Pimmon to current sound mavericks such as Evol or Lee Gamble. The selection is reminiscent of Adnan Coker’s forward-thinking Untitled masterpiece: all the elements and values in Coker’s works are individual and thereby distinguished from the absolute, truly united as one at the organic working level. This is quite similar to Mesmeon’s complex and dynamic mix, which includes both rational and thoughtfully irrational sound trajectories, turns and shifts. It seems that Mesmeon perceives glitchy music in the same way Coker saw the colour black, which wasn’t so much a colour for him, but rather a space, a sense of dimension integral to his works. The overall sound landscape Mesmeon created with his mix shows the vast possibilities of music production, which are far beyond the musical standards of the day.

In the records

Mesmeon on the mix

As a partially formed world, multisensory disturbance prickles into musical and technological instruments, slowly synthesized through the interaction of barely comprehensible processes.

farmersmanual

This mix showcases archetypically digital and computer based music, focusing on hard-to-find and hard-edged examples of extreme/radical computer music mostly from the dawn of the millennium. Particularly of interest here is the dead netlabel Fals.ch (1999-2005), which from an extremely obfuscated website, offered “hypermusic on purpose” and published two mini-cds containing releases in highly compressed, lossy formats. Also of interest here is a release by Farmers Manual titled “RLA”: containing “every locatable live recording” of Farmers Manual. This DVD Data Disk contains 3 days, 21 hours, 38 minutes and 3 seconds of audio data in mp3 format, and some excerpts are featured here.