Mark Fell And Will Guthrie Infoldings / Diffractions

Infoldings / Diffractions combines synthesis and acoustic percussion in unpredictable, pointillist
arrangements where Guthrie plays against patterns derived from Max MSP patches by Fell. The
album’s four longform expositions are in this sense different to the man-machine concept of
Fell’s acclaimed ‘Intra’ album, where he triggered performances by Portugal’s Drumming Grupo
De Percussão to play a metallophone designed by Iannis Xenakis. Here, the pair find common and
sometimes contrasting purpose in a probing of rhythmic signatures, with groundbreaking results.
Recorded at HFG, Karlsruhe (where Fell is guest professor), and finished later in respective
isolation, the pieces were edited from iterations of call-and-response between Fell’s rhythmic
patterns and Guthrie’s overdubs. They effectively propose beguiling solutions to electronic music’s
problems with grid-lock, using generative processing to make physical actions seem unfeasibly
effortless, while melting the computer’s clock to a real-time, free-hand syncopation.
Taking the influence of gamelan and fusing it with the fractal computer music that Fell has
obsessively picked-at over the last four decades, the duo zoom into a sound that’s completely
captivating; mutating into polyrhythmic outer-realms and eerie universes of microtonality that
are hard to fathom in a single sitting.
There are trace echoes of free jazz hanging from the rafters, the post-everything chatter of
Humcrush and Food drummer Thomas Strønen’s mind-expanding solo material or even Autechre
at their most confounding. The genius here is that just as you convince yourself that the music
could only possibly have been generated by a computer, Guthrie’s unmistakably human flex edges
into focus - playing with perception and expectation in the most wild, liquid way imaginable.