THE MAW OF by Rachel Rossin (*1987, US) is a transmedia story — a narrative unfolding across multiple platforms and formats about the coming together of flesh, machine, cognition, and code provoked by current research into brain-computer interfaces.
Music and sound design by Aaron David Ross featuring music by Debussy
Artist and composer ADR (Aaron David Ross) stops by NM on the occasion of his new album, Filter Failure and launch of his label with Gatekeeper partner Matthew Arkell, Legendarium. Reflecting on his past decade of cultural production—see: Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems, Grant Singer’s iconic 2012 cult short, IRL; collaborations with Dis, Kelela, Lafawndah, Mykki Blanco, Ryan Trecartin, Telfar, Korakrit Arunanondchai—ADR discusses how he sees the industry and our sensibilities co-evolving.
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LGND001 - Out July 11th 2021 on Legendarium
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FILTER FAILURE Filter Failure is the new album and audiovisual work by composer, producer, and artist Aaron David Ross (ADR). Following his work on the acclaimed Uncut Gems soundtrack and solo releases Deceptionista and Throat on PAN, Filter Failure takes the form of a cinematic song cycle, featuring ten animated tone poems which showcase ADR as both a cybernetic singer-songwriter and as a 3D hobbyist animator.
Filter Failure features ADR as a storyteller-architect-maestro, conducting an exodus across panoramic vistas of his making—landscapes, architectures, and lounges all brimming with iconography that mirror the album’s detailed compositions. Long engaged in a practice of reconstructing the archeology of classical, jazz, pop, and electronic music into new contemporary art & technological contexts, Filter Failure stands apart as a hybrid opus, synthesizing years of ADR’s obsessive genre studies that have spanned over a decade of solo releases and collaborative works.
The eponymous concept of “Filter Failure”—originating from theories around Web 2.0 digital workflows—occurs when our filtration mechanisms rupture from sheer access, resulting in being completely at the whim of the avalanche-feed of information and shifting contexts. As if reveling in the wreckage, Filter Failure is ADR’s most maximalist vision to date: a vibrant amalgam of symphonic wanderlust: ascending pizzicato, riffing drifts of digital wind, epic bacchanals of rhythm and bass. Throughout, ADR’s previously unheard voice is a clairvoyant chorus, remarking on its own fragmented subjectivity—a trace remnant of humanity’s hubristic meltdown now freed to encircle the world as a transcendent RPG protagonist. ADR’s vocals—frayed with layered tonality—ring true as both an evocation and a narrative degeneration of a cherished tradition of sensitive, introspective songwriters.