Psychophysicist – Audio Computing
CD – ARMComm Rizosfera Europe
It has taken twenty-eight years for this second album to arrive from Psychophysicist – the psychoacoustic project of Adi Newton, the charismatic frontman of seminal, cyberpunk group Clock DVA. The multi-instrumentalist and now electronic manipulator, originally from Sheffield, has always been comfortable juggling different styles, capable of alien-pop bursts but also refined experimental and conceptual explorations, supported in his many incarnations by various high-profile collaborators. This time he is joined by Paul Prudence, a writer, theorist, and performer who works with generative videos and abstract soundscapes. Newton and Prudence have been working together intermittently since 2016 and in 2023 were joined by sound composer and graphic artist Fabio Kubic. Adi Newton also worked with Jacques Beloeil on the production, equalization and mastering of the album. The seven compositions that arise from these various collaborations are compelling. The conceptual origins of the project lie in the theoretical work of Boris Yankovsky, a member of the Multzvuk group and student of Arsiney Araamov, another important Russian avant-garde composer. Many artists from the 1930s experimented with optical synthesis methods and photoelectric processes. Yankovsky in particular realised that timbre was a material characteristic of complex sounds and felt that it was vital in developing a spectral approach. His work was based on the belief that it was possible to develop a universal language of sound using different combinations of hand-drawn spectral ‘sound objects’, similar to the cross-synthesis and phase-synthesis techniques that came later. We, in the case of this work from Adi Newton, don’t need to philosophise on sound, but prefer to stick to what Karlheinz Stockhausen mentioned in an interview once when he underlined how he was interested in ‘only the results’ and not the way they were obtained. On Audio Computing, the results are truly wonderful.
