Side effects may include inside jokes about Kenny Loggins…

Ask your doctor about the newest G LEAGUE IGNITE video, “Metaphorical prednisone.”

I think it’s fair to say that G LEAGUE IGNITE is more groove-oriented than any other music I’ve made - Bridges of Königsberg is probably the closest competition, but the beats there tend more towards abstraction, where GLI is more about bringing the thump (no matter what pattern or meter we’re talking about). The emphasis on cyclic patterns is a big part of why my inner sixteen-year-old loves this music more than anything else I’ve ever made. (The other major reason he loves it is SYNTHESIZERS). My inner twenty-six-year-old is more skeptical, but when did that guy ever not have something critical to say? He’s a terrible snob. 😉

Because of our focus on groove, I think more often about the genre influences feeding into G LEAGUE IGNITE than I do with other projects I’m involved in. But ultimately it feels less about genres and more about specific artists or even specific features of those artists’ work. My knowledge of metal is incredibly shallow (even before comparing with Dennis, whose grasp of the genre is encyclopedic), but my “slow down, feed everything into a plate reverb and then feed that into heavy distortion” tactic is a twisted recreation of the way I hear Sleep’s sludgy, slow music. In comparing notes, Dennis and I discovered a shared enthusiasm for Nine Inch Nails, and… go figure, suddenly there were growling, distorted bass tones appearing in our playing. And after we separately attended Autechre shows this past October (in Brooklyn and Philadelphia respectively), and then spent a chunk of the following week working together while buzzing about the experience, our grooves took on new levels of density, dynamic detail, and rhythmic complexity.

At the end of the day I don’t think we sound a whole lot like any of those influences (your mileage may vary), but it’s been interesting to see how we’ve adapted and synthesized these shared enthusiasms - alongside our post-classical training and experiences with noise and improv - into the heady brew that is G LEAGUE IGNITE. (I want to make a joke about our “balanced roster” here but that’s pushing the basketball metaphor way too far).

A couple of live performances hoving into view:

G LEAGUE IGNITE plays Final Friday at the Newark Bike Project (230 E Main Street, Suite 323, Newark DE) on May 29. Doors at 9 pm, music at 9:30. There are a lot of perfectly sensible reasons why it’s taken us this long to book our first show, but it’ll feel good to get off the schneid.

And then househusbands roar back to life on June 18, 8 pm at the Good Shepherd Center (4649 Sunnyside Ave N, Seattle, WA) alongside Aaron Michael Butler. I am very much looking forward to a reunion with fellow househusband Carlos Cotallo Solares, and to the opportunity to make some music in the Pacific Northwest.

(I’m taking a week spent on jury duty as my excuse to write one more “recap” about the instrument I’ve developed for work with Dennis).

In the previous newsletter, I mentioned that I’ve gradually de-emphasized my use of drum machine-style pattern sequencers in G LEAGUE IGNITE - not only because Dennis provides all the drumming we need, but also because I want to focus on interaction and playing in this project, rather than supervising sequencers and algorithms. (neural goldberg is where my impulses towards generative music get expressed).

That isn’t quite the whole story, though. Even as I’ve stopped using my instrument’s facility to set up looping melodic or percussive patterns that will drive the synthesizer voices, I’ve started adding cyclic patterns to the effects processors that manipulate the output of those voices. Where in a previous generation of the instrument, a knob might control the amount of distortion applied to a given tone, now the distortion feature includes a continuously cycling rhythmic pattern, and the knob controls how many steps of that pattern turn on the distortion versus letting the sound through unaltered.

Because I’m me, and love complicated things, the rhythms aren’t necessarily periodic - various syncopations, tuplets, and randomly generated durations are all available. Also, the loops aren’t entirely repetitive - the length of the pattern can change each time through, so on one traversal you might hear twelve distinct steps in the pattern, and on the next traversal only five of those elements. Furthermore, while all of the sequenced effects processors (reverbs, filters, ring modulators, etc.) applied to a given synthesizer voice move in rhythmic lockstep, they aren’t necessarily all switching on and off at the same time - so the combinations and sonic details change over the length of the sequence. It’s an exciting new arrow in the quiver, and one that you can hear throughout my performance in “Metaphorical prednisone” - listen for those burbling rhythms internal to a given sound, and you’re in the right place.

Thanks as always for listening and reading - yours,

Christopher

Christopher Burns
christopherburnsmusic.com