LGND001 - Out July 11th 2021 on Legendarium
adr
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.
For the Performa 19 Biennial, New York and Bangkok based artist Korakrit Arunanondchai, in collaboration with boychild, Bonaventure, Alex Gvojic, and Aaron David Ross, will present a performance in the form of an invented reality, collapsing oral storytelling and local mythologies into Thailand’s complex history with the American military, national policies and Buddhist kingship.
Based on Ghost Cinema, a post-Vietnam War ritual in Thailand where outdoor screenings function as communions between the audience and the spirits. Introduced by American soldiers stationed in Thailand who screened films in the forests, creating enigmatic projections which locals attributed to ghosts, the appropriation of the ritual by locals reflects the rich history of military coups and their effect on local folklore and rituals.