Place Writer

Jacktone Records 2016

Place Writer is a concept album (digital or cassette) comprised of hybrid and experimental DJing. It is half original production, featuring guitars, vocals, and keys, and half sample feed. While some areas of each track may ring familiar, the work does more than prompt us to participate in techno trivia: it facilitates a private experience, one that guides us through our own minds and labyrinths of memories, encouraging us to build tools to use against genetic predisposition and emotional triggers. By using readily available sources, we can build landmarks in our minds.

Every external endeavor is filtered through neurological imprints. The more worn these imprints, the wider; the oldest ones will host the most new traffic. As a result, new experiences are rendered indistinct or even identical to past experiences. Our respective profusions of stored memory and hereditary mapping serve as pathways for new intake, yet spoil novelty and newness. A side-effect of this type of perceptive nature is obsessiveness. When our neurological signals become locked in a pattern of triggers, we are enabled to make the same decision repeatedly, even if it is a harmful one. We project our histories onto the present – although the present is entirely fresh and unattached to the past – and simply keep thinking the same thing over and over, stuck in a feedback loop of well-known pings and sensations.

Through similar repetition, Place Writer both commentates on and acknowledges this nature of cyclical perception and cognition. It replicates the difficult yet bitterly comforting mental processes that accompany us in our day-to-day lives as it provides a balanced amount of both inflammatory and sanguine expressions, fleeting like the way we experience our personal triggers. Place Writer is designed to serve as a tool for self-aware cognition which can help us avoid mental feedback looping. As the title would imply, the project is about finding and flagging locations within the brain where such triggers sit sustained. In order to arrive at a fresh understanding of our own behaviors and intake the world without spoils, it is good practice to memorize and name the roads, intersections, and coordinates where these bumps inevitably wait for us. As long as we know where they are, we can anticipate and swerve around them.

Each of the tracks on this album are named after the sights of sounds of triggering memories unique to the artist and her life experience.

Place Writer was premiered as a multilayered hybrid DJ set at the DAT Music Conference in Missoula, Montana, USA in 2015, with live visuals by Leo Mayberry. It has further been performed at Decibel Festival 2015, in Seattle, Washington, USA, and AHA Festival of Progressive Art 2015, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Other venues that have hosted PLACE WRITER A/V have been Casa del Popolo in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 52Hz in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, and Penasco Theatre in Penasco, New Mexico, USA.

Track list:
A1. Afternoon Quarter
A2. Untersage
A3. Canyon Guts
A4. Neversummer
A5. Strange World Map
A6. Walk Around Freelance Lake
B1. Private Life
B2. Risky Bismuth
B3. Concentric Plunging
B4. Where You Feel Centered
B5. Black Locust