MrDougDoug SOS Forks AI REM

Doug Kaplan wants you to be happy, to stare into the digital void, and to merrily prank you into a puddle of fractals. As MrDougDoug, he makes music to entertain and challenge in equal measure. The MIDI-contorting sci-fi opus SOS Forks AI REM represents his debut album of solo material on Hausu Mountain. While Doug continues to explore the possibilities of noise improvisation and guitar performance in the trio Good Willsmith and other projects, SOS Forks AI REM finds him harnessing his in-the-box production experience to create an album entirely using software instruments. MrDougDoug drudges up pre-existing MIDI files from the Internet Archive’s Geocities Collection and freemidi.org and overhauls them to suit his twisted tastes. Kaplan’s style of re-contextualization balances the spastic urges of John Oswald’s plunderphonic pop experiments with the attention to production detail and cyborg texture of Oneohtrix Point Never - all while maintaining a sense of reckless glee and mischief reminiscent of The Residents’ stable on Ralph Records. MrDougDoug imagines a future where speakers continue to shrink and shrink, from earbuds to phone speakers to biologically integrated playback devices sounding out of minuscule flesh amplifiers, blasting into the realms of unprecedented fidelities. SOS Forks AI REM, then, is what emerges from those pore-sized speakers. Each note overloads the device, and each track overloads the brain.